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committoreality · 6 years ago

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You are a snake, and so am I.

Everything we do, we do to validate a story about reality that is premised on a delusion. Our self concept is a series of fictions that we maintain to keep us more or less stable.

1. I am in a loving and happy relationship. People respond to tones and actions of others in unique ways. As we get more familiar in our relationships, we learn the triggers of others. We learn what pushes their buttons, what makes them loving and soft, what makes them confident. We learn that our friends give us more attention when we’re in a crisis situation, when we’re confident and outgoing, when we’re listening attentively. We become very familiar with the behaviours that elicit certain emotions in those close to us. My boyfriend gives me most attention when I’m sad, maternal, or independent. My friend gives me most attention when I have an exciting new idea that is intellectually stimulating. My friend gives me most attention when I show sympathy and am deeply attentive. My boyfriend pushes me away when I’m needy, jealous, or stressed.

We become deeply familiar with these dynamics. We amplify certain behaviours to elicit the desired response. We manipulate the people we’re close to. We want the reassurance that our relationships are a certain way, so we do things to validate those ideas. But it is manipulation to sustain a fiction. We want to bring out the qualities in others that will conform more or less to the version of reality that we subscribe to.

2. I had the idea that if I ate whatever I wanted when I wanted, and succumbed to any craving, that I would gain an exception amount of weight and be horribly unattractive. I sustained this fiction by conforming closely to what I believed I had to do stay the weight I wanted. Why did I want this weight? Because it fit into my self concept. I am healthy, fit, slim, and am generally the thinnest girl in most settings. This body image was deeply integrated into my self concept. I stopped conforming to those ideas. I eat whatever I want, eat a lot of pizza, chocolate, fried chicken, coffee with milk and sugar, and I can’t gain weight. I stay within this range. When we do challenge the behaviours we believe we need to sustain our self concept, it is not only enlightening, but baffling. When you have experiences that show that the stories you have been accepting are premised on complete fictions, this is humbling. Because we don’t know why we do the things we do.

3. I read a paper that references Ta’Nehisi Coats. From intellectuals I respect, I’ve come to accept that his ideas are radical, post modern, and conform to an intellectual tradition I do not like. Have I read anything by him? No. But I have this idea of myself, as a centrist. I am critical to a lot of post-modern thought, and I don’t respect the tradition because I reject the principles it is premised on. But to discredit a thinker on the basis that those who think like me discredit him is ridiculous. But I do so because I have a self concept that identifies with a specific intellectual tradition. Of course, self deception and simplification is useful because it means you don’t have to inquire into everything. This makes life easier. Dealing with complexity and dwelling in the unknown is challenging. Identification is comforting. It allows you to have trust. But it is dangerous.

4. I believed that men preferred thin and fit women. Because the men who I’ve been with have been attracted to me, I am thin and fit, therefore I accepted the premise that men like thin women. My boyfriend likes big girls. I was so confused and baffled by this information, because it disconfirmed an idea I had latched onto my whole life. Again, this shattered my fiction, and shook my self concept as proximating an ideal. It made me consider, maybe I am not that attractive.

5. I have a self concept about being pulled together, looking wealthy and clean. Whenever I have messy hair, when my skin is bad, when I’m dressed in ill fitting clothes- I have this deep discomfort. This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am. People will look at me and get the wrong idea of me. But what is the “right” idea? The fiction you tell yourself. This fiction is premised on inauthenticity. What about being altruistic? You pretend to care about justice, you display performative virtue, you attend public events that will validate this notion that you are committed to justice, to equality. You apologize for your ignorance. Why do you do this? It aligns well with the sense of moral superiority and virtue you associate with. But what is equality? Reality isn’t equal and it never will be. Some people are stronger, more intelligent, more beautiful, have a strong work ethic, are maternal and loving, are radiant. These qualities play into differential outcomes. Equality is an idea. It is an abstraction. It is an idea we associate with virtue and thus embody traits that we think are relevant to this ideal. It is a fiction. Moral superiority is a fiction.

6. We get mad when our partner flirts with someone else. When they consider someone else attractive, beautiful, whole, radiant. Why? Because their interest challenges the notion that we are special. That we are somehow deeply linked to this person. That we have security. That we are special and unique. It challenges the idea that our partner is deeply committed to us, and sees these unique traits. It is an emotion premised on insecurity. Premised on the fiction that we have security, that one person will exclusively love us. The fiction that our qualities are somehow unique. You’re not special. You cannot guarantee the loyalty of your partner. You cannot reduce the greatness of others. Nevertheless we allow ourselves to feel threatened based on the idea that your partner’s interest in others is somehow a threat to your relationship, and the fiction that their loyalty is in your power to control. So we manipulate. Through expressions of jealousy, demonization of the person your partner flirts with, amplifying the qualities you think your partner is attracted to, going out of your way to display your “amazing” qualities. You’re not special or any more valuable than anyone else.

We believe that being genetically similar somehow makes connections deeper and more stable. That intimacy and vulnerability makes your connection with a person deeper. That sharing significant experiences makes your connection deeper. It doesn’t. This sense of depth in a relationship is premised on these fictions that these dimensions of shared experience somehow tie you deeply to someone else. They can still leave. They can still cheat. But so long as you mutually subscribe to this idea that you are intimately connected, then this fiction works as glue to the relationship. It’s a fiction.

What is a romantic relationship? My conclusion is that a romantic relationship is having a personal space invader. The person is allowed to get very close physically, even put themselves inside of you, lick the inside of your mouth, spend a lot of time in your dwelling, eat food within a meter of so of each other. This person invades your space and takes up your time more than any other person. What is romance? The idea that sharing fictions and emotions leads to deep love. What is love? Feeling like the other person invading your space means that they think your special. You like this a lot. You like having a space invader because it signals that you’re not so repulsive and intolerable. That’s a nice idea. What is a long term relationship, or a marriage? It’s a promise that you’ll continue to invade a person’s space, eliminate possibilities of not invading that person’s space for a long time.

My partner and I just signed a lease for a year. All that is is a promise that the owner of this house will give us 330 square feet of space, and this 330 square feet will function as the space we will mutually invade. We have decided that we will be each others space invaders for at least a year. We buy furniture together, keep things in a closet together, so that not only the space around our bodies is invaded frequently, but that our “belongings” will have to share a space as well. It means we will promise to link our lives together in such a way that not being each other’s space invader for the year will cause a lot of friction.

What is a marriage? It’s a contract that you’ll space invade until death! And if you change your mind it will be costly in many ways. It is a fun little trap that you mutually accept. This contract is another fiction. You can’t be bound to another human, you can’t own another human, you can’t connect to another human. You connect more because we accept the premise that invading space and penetrating a person’s body is special and is a “bonding” experience. What about reading a book? You connect with these fictional people. What about being turned on by porn? You’re literally having a sexual experience with pixels on a screen. What about reading a self help book? You’re feeling vulnerable with words on a page written by someone you’ll probably never know. What about connecting with “God”, who is God? How do you know him/her? Does God invade your personal space? Or is God just a thought that you “connect” to?

We have these ideas and love to manipulate the world to keep these ideas alive. You can see delusion in others, but neglect the ways you are equally deluded. We put smoke detectors in our homes, locks on our door, wear helmets, don’t walk alone at night. But what if you get hit by a car? What is you have an aneurysm? What if you slip in the bath an hit your head and drown? We think we can reduce risks, but it’s just supporting this fiction that we can manipulate the world to give us a false sense of security. We will all die of mortality. The people we love will leave us or die. Our house might get burnt down, we might be struck by lightning. Safety is an idea. Security is an idea.

It’s all a fiction. And you lie to yourself daily to support these fictions. You manipulate others and deceive yourself into believing these fictions. You’re a snake. You’re not above self delusions and neither am I.

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boibih · 7 years ago

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Theory Time: The Big Question

What is consciousness? How does it exist? Why?

Before I start I want to make it clear that I am not a neuroscientist, quantum physicist or religious philosopher. Please don't expect me to treat this as a serious scientific paper. It's just a train of thought. So forgive the very amateur outlook and language I have on the topics I hope to discuss. I hope to bring you on the mental journey I went through to discover what I now hold as a believable, however un-intuitive theory on how the world works.

Consciousness in the Brain:

One of the worst/best ideas I ever had was when I started thinking about consciousness and the human brain. I do not really believe in a soul in the heavenly sense, so instead, I believed that the answer to consciousness must reside somewhere in the human brain. A book by the polish writer Stanislav Lem, called "Peace on Earth" (Pokoj na Ziemi) a protagonist returns to earth with partial memory loss caused by a wound that separated his right and left brain hemispheres. To continue his journey he must communicate with his right brain hemisphere. This idea fascinated me, and what astonished me most was that this was based off a real-life phenomenon - Split Brain Syndrome (SBS). Usually found in people who have undergone brain surgery to treat epilepsy, SBS is when the two sides of the brain are severed from each other and cannot internally communicate.

Does the "soul" or the conscious part of the brain remain in one place? Or does it split in two? Reality is really very close to what Stanislav Lem described. The left part of our brain is responsible for speech and facial recognition, and the one us onlookers can communicate easiest with (by talking). It is also responsible for the control of the right side of the body (including the eyes), and vice versa for the left. My question was what makes these now separate brains the same person? What makes them different? Should I treat them as two people? After a typically post-millennial teenager google search I found sources that could help me understand. Youtube videos, medical papers, newspapers. Wow, what a power the internet has. I came to the conclusion that there are two things that make an individual different from another individual:

-Conflicts of Experience-

You and me see from different perspectives, and that's part of what gives us our individuality. Various experiments showed that people living with SBS could often come to conflicts of experience with right and left brains. When told to look at a single dot in the middle of a screen, with words and images popping up on the left or right of the dot, the left brain (responsible for speech) could tell us verbally what it saw on the right. However, when it saw something on the left, they couldn't verbally tell us what it was, but with their left hand could draw it. The Right Brain was communicating. The right brain experienced something the left did not! However this was just a lack of internal communication, doesn't mean its a different person right? This brings me onto my next point.

-Conflicts of Opinion-

The Different experiences people have fundamentally change what they think and the way they think. What separates my mind from yours is what we see and how we see it, and to the peril of the world, every person has a different view point. The two sides of the brain in a person with SBS is no different. And the two brains (halves of a brain) have now been proven to experience things differently. They see out of different eyeballs, recognise people differently, control different tasks. So do they have different opinions then surely? A neuroscientist Rhawn Joseph observed a patient having literal conflicts between left and right. The left hand would carry out actions contrary to the left hemisphere's motives. For example, the left hand turning off the television immediately after the right hand turned it on like an old bickering couple. It went so far that the patient’s left leg would try and walk in a different direction to the right! The conflict was so irritating to the patient that he even stated "I hate this hand" as his left hand struggled with his right. Like two individuals fighting in one body. This is often called "Alien Hand Syndrome", found in some people with SBS.

The important conclusion that I drew from these thoughts and research is that consciousness can be split. I saw no reason to consider the left or right as the same individual. It ticked all the boxes of separate "souls" as far as I was concerned.

The fact that consciousness can be split is an important step in me coming to my final conclusion. It completely went against my prior belief in the fact that we are individual souls. This is because if there's a connection between two 'individuals' (left and right) they can act as a single individual, as shown by you and me with our perfectly intact *corpus callosum*s between the two hemispheres of the brain. What's to stop some crazy Frankenstein-like scientist to connect two full human brains together with some more neural connections? Wouldn't this also create a functioning single consciousness? Is the simple lack of being physically connected to you what makes me and you separate people?

Consciousness in the rest of the universe:

Then my inquiry turned to AI. Would connecting an artificial computer to a brain do the same thing? Is a computer conscious? This was quickly going down a rabbit hole that was going to be very tricky to navigate. The ability of something that is created by humans becoming conscious has been in the dreams of scientists and sci-fi nerds for decades if not centuries. Why would an organic computer be any different from one created by machines in its ability to contain consciousness? Its complexity? Where would the line in the scale of complexity lie? There's machines more self-aware than worms, that process information more complexly than worms, are they more conscious than worms? I started to notice a pattern in this. Information was being collected and used to form behaviour. From hard-wired instincts (solid code) to more complex learnt behaviour (self-programming). At this point I yet again went on a tangent, what made it 'ethical' to just turn a computer on/off. I decided that it was the lack of a self-preservation emotion that animals have, but that's a topic for another day.

Information being exchanged (or taken in) was clearly a fundamental part of experience, and thus of consciousness. This is because if we experience nothing, we can think nothing right? What about dreaming? (I imagine all these questions are getting tiresome- blame my English teachers, according to them rhetorical questions are an "engaging writing technique") My answer to dreaming was that although there is no external stimulus that we experience, we have dreams as a way of getting stimulus out of our own mind and memory - our imagination. So I concluded from that, that for consciousness to arise there must be an exchange of information. That would make sense to me. Our brains take in a lot of information through their sensory organs, but also from within themselves - memories being one of the more obvious examples, as well as imagination (the ability to create new stimulus from mixing and filling gaps of old information, which is what computers can now do with the help of machine learning - exciting stuff)

If a baby had developed in the womb in a coma, I theorised it'd be brain-dead, it wouldn't dream or be conscious in any way. This means that the flow of information is required to begin consciousness. In fact, maybe information IS consciousness. This meant that not just electrical signals were conscious, but everything that interacted with anything else. An analogue computer like ones designed by Babbage (look him up he's really cool) is just materials exerting forces on each other, so transferring information. Does this mean tectonic plates are conscious in a simplistic way as they exert forces on each other? Does this mean atoms in the air are conscious as they exert pressure on the walls of a balloon?

I wondered what this meant for the idea of a soul, and I had an epiphany. As someone who grew up in the western world, the soul is highly specific to people, and it's very individualised. "Save your soul by Jesus" etc. I realised that my idea was evolving more towards eastern ideologies. Buddhism and Hinduism both belief in a version of the "great one/unit" or "Brahman". Instead of heaven, your soul will join the great singular soul of the universe. This started to make sense to me. Consciousness is unified when information is compiled, individuality is lost when you are connected to the rest of the universe. This was a nice thought, but instead of becoming part of the Brahman, I believe it's the opposite when you die your consciousness stops being so complex from all the compiling of information that was happening in your brain. The stream of ever evolving information stops. Consciousness dies with death. Oh well, I didn't believe in an afterlife anyway.

I hit this point in my thoughts on this subject about a year ago and hit a plateau. I thought this was the end-point of my journey, so I started trying to explain it to my poor friends - they didn't really listen. I'm like a less cool Jaden Smith. I was wrong about this being the end-point. Recently, I watched a TED-talk by David Chalmers (100% watch it) and was absolutely delighted with what he said. He came to it through a completely different path came to the same conclusion, and unlike the unprofessional and boring me gave it a cute little name. Panpsychism. The idea that all information transferred is conscious to an extent. What a relief, I'm not crazy.

Essentially, your body and brain is a TV screen (Thank you, David Chalmers, for this analogy), through which the universe can experience YOUR movie. You ARE the universe and you're simply experiencing the "movie" through all your senses and emotions.

You think things have been weird so far? Well, they're about to get even weirder. When I said I watched a TED-talk, I meant I watched about 5 hours worth of Ted-talks. Quantum Physics was on my mind. A quantum particle can act like a wave or a particle (or both) depending on whether it is being observed or not. In other words, whether it is passing on information onto another body or not. See where I'm going with this? The presence of consciousness is when information is being passed on, so the particle acts differently when it is 'conscious' or isn't. {more stuff - research}

I think it is important to distinguish consciousness and human experience. I feel that we, as writers and scientists and members of the sci-fi nerd community put too much human signature onto the way we define consciousness. What I mean by this is that we hold how we measure consciousness to a human standard. The Turing test, to see if a computer is truly self-aware, tests if the machine can convince a person that it is actually a human. I don't think this is a fair test as many of our logical pathways and behavioural norms are either evolutionary or societal. A sentient being does not have to emulate the human mindset, it may have entirely different ways to sense information and entirely different ways of processing it.

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spacecollaborative-blog · 8 years ago

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Final Edit

Introduction to Doctor Jane Healy’s Essay on the Ian McKinnon Logs.

The daily logs of Doctor Ian McKinnon were found among the rubble of the Astra 27 three days after it plummeted to earth in the April of 2067 after a failure in the electrical wiring. These logs, since then, have been heralded the most convincing piece of evidence supporting the movement to end solo space travel since the first Astra took flight in 2037. The logs support the argument that ships as technologically complex as the Astra model can not be manned alone, and that machine failure cannot be overcome alone. But I believe the logs provide substantially darker evidence as to why solo space travel should be abolished for good.

Log 1.

I think that I should perhaps do a little introduction. Hello, my name is Ian and I’m 34 years old. Goodness, this I’ve made this sound like school. Hi, I’m Ian and I’m 34 and I like TV and the colour yellow, when I grow up I’d like to fly to space. I’m rambling. They don’t make it clear what we’re meant to be reporting in these logs. I suppose some sort of progress report. Right, well, I’m heading to space and that seems to be going rather well so far. Astra 27 all intact, no malfunctions yet, at least none that the Astra deems necessary to warn me of. It’s all quite exciting. Until tomorrow!

23rd May 2067, Post-Mortem

Upon careful examination of the body of Doctor Ian McKinnon it has been discovered that the cause of death was electrocution. It has been deduced that the most likely cause of this was the deceased’s attempt to correct the faulty wiring of the ship. This deduction is being contested due to the unlikelihood of the scenario, due to each astronaut’s teachings not to touch the motherboard of the ship. Further tests are being run.

Log 61.

It seems horrifically ungrateful, doesn’t it, to say that space can get boring. I spend each morning staring down at the Earth in the same way I would stare at the stars as a boy. I could name every constellation, pull out all the important stars and attempt to make friends by listing them off to any poor child that made the faux-pas of standing too close to me at Scout Camp. Sirius, of course, was my favourite. But if anyone asked it was Vega, for it’s blue. But I knew it was Sirius, quite simply because it was big and in the dog constellation, two things that excited my prepubescent brain. And now, I stare at the Earth. I watch as it turns and each day I wait to see the tiny slice of Europe and wonder at all the little boys and girls who are just getting to sleep after spending the night looking up into the sky. How many, I wonder, will tell their friends they had seen a shooting star? I’m sure they knew, as I did, that it was really a helicopter, but their friends didn’t need to know that. But here, there is no one to tell about the slice of Europe I can see every day.

There were no malfunctions in the Astra today.

20th April 2067, The Telegraph

A night of speculation and panic has reached a devastating end this morning as the bright lights that streaked the sky in the early hours of the morning are revealed by NASA to be the Astra 27 plummeting back home. After a severe malfunction in the wiring, it appears that British astronaut Doctor Ian McKinnon tried to return the rocket to the plains of Colorado, USA, to save the £25 million machine and his own life. Yet, terribly, to no avail. Though the atmospheric shields remained secure through both the Thermosphere and Mesosphere, saving the Astra from combustion, it shut down entirely just a cruel 55km from the Earth’s surface. In a plead posted on the NASA website as dawn broke, we are asked to take a minute’s silence at midday to honour the deceased Doctor Ian McKinnon.

Log 76.

Outside the right window, you can see nothing. A static screen through the rectangular glass. It reminds me of being young again, the black with white flecks, often curtained with soft grey. But this time without the potential mystery of a unidentified flying helicopter. Perhaps, from this window, nothing is a bit harsh. In the clean, unaffected glass I can see myself. The grounding reminder that I still exist.

Log 80.

You left me a booklet that I consult every single day. It tells me about the importance of routine in maintaining your sanity. So I read it every morning as soon as I wake up. It stresses the importance of remembering your past self, your self on earth. Little tics, little habits you have to maintain. As well as new routines to integrate into your new life. So, after checking the booklet, and my pocket-watch, I go to the motherboard.

2nd June 2034, NASA interview posted to their website

We are honoured to reveal today the next revolution in battling the final frontier. After decades of innovation, experimentation and exploration, Professors Amelia Hudson and Alijaz Guildenstern can now reveal their Astra, a rocket that can not only fly itself to and through the universe, but can also repair itself if it should encounter any technical malfunction.

‘It will completely change our idea of space,’ says Hudson, ‘No longer will it be an unattainable image, but a reachable destination that any person can visit.’

That is not to say, however, that the Astra can be flown by your average man. But this is a solid step paving the way to the human race’s conquering of the stars as space travel becomes more accessible and safer by the day.

Log 95.

I woke up to bright blue lights. Small, glowing beams of iridescence, burning onto my eyelid. As I closed my eyes the image of them glowered on my eyelid from the clinical blue to a fuzzy red and when I opened my eyes again they were gone. But when I closed my eyes again they were there, but fading quickly. And the more I blinked the quicker they left, until I was quite unsure whether they really existed in the first place. I wish there was someone here, to make sure I’m not going crazy. I have checked the Astra status and there has been no reported malfunction. I have reasoned with myself and have come to the conclusion that when my eyes went from black to this sterile white interior my brain must’ve confused itself, forgot its function, forgot how to process. This makes sense to me.

As for space, it remains the same. When I stare out the window I can see the same stars, and they all look the same. Until tomorrow.

Log 129.

It doesn’t quite make sense anymore. My theory doesn’t quite play out. The blue lights are here in the day. And god how they taunt me. They dance around me but I can’t follow them. They burn onto my eyes and I can’t blink to make them run away. I think they’re maybe in my brain now. It is cruel. But who can I tell? I can look down onto the earth and see the piece of my home and scream at them, hoping that my cries will make it through the machine, the vacuum, the spheres, air, bricks, into home. But I’m not that crazy yet. There has been three alerts in the rocket today, the wiring has been damaged but it is being fixed.

Log 135.

I have spent the day investigating the blue fairies. They’re just how I imagined the sprites in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck a whirl of blue, causing mischief and praying on those who are alone, changing their psychology and their desires. Now when I wake up I don’t really see him, but I can hear him a little, his clanging in the engine room echoing into my room. I see him later though, when I check the motherboard. Not properly, of course, just a quick flash. The machine is working hard to repair the wiring.

A clipping from James Goodwin’s 2086 award winning non-fiction novel on Ian McKinnon.

On a small metal spaceship, with thin, empty corridors, sharp corners and smooth walls, any sound you might hear, you will hear. Sometimes, Ian would tap one of the metal pipes and listen as the sound reverberated through the hallways, bouncing off the sterile, steel walls until it reached him again. It was nice, for Ian to have those little conversations with the walls. It made him forget quite how alone he was. And for hours at a time he would tap, sometimes a little pattern, occasionally the tune to a simple song from home, but mostly just single taps, waiting for them to come back before he’d reply again. It became part of his routine. He would wake up to the bright blue lights, check the motherboard, then talk.

Sometimes, if Ian was lucky, he wouldn’t have to start the conversation himself. He would hear a knock, or a pattern, or a little song from home, and stop what he was doing and knock back. It never particularly crossed his mind who he was talking to, it was just nice to have someone there. In fact, it wasn’t until Ian heard him talk that he had even considered meeting him.

“Hello?” Ian said, when he heard the voice. “Who’s there?”

The man was sitting in the control centre. His hand, which was resting on his lap when Ian first saw him, was now gliding over to the motherboard. He didn’t speak when Ian saw him, although he did hear him on several occasions after though he only saw him once more after this day. He was older than he was, with receding hair and deep lines on his forehead. He wore a well-fitting grey suit, and he had with him a briefcase. He made Ian feel small, in a lovely way. Ian quite liked looking at him, he was comforting and he liked having someone there with him so he wasn’t quite so alone. His hand, which had a few freckles covered with long, curling grey hairs, ran over the buttons and wires. He ran over them in a circle, like he was memorising the pattern. He gave Ian a comforting smile, picked up his briefcase and left.

2nd June, 2067, The Telegraph.

In a disturbing progression of events, Doctor Ian McKinnon’s Captain’s Logs have been found amongst the rubble of the Astra 27. Doctor Ian McKinnon has now been honoured and mourned by the nation for his tragic death two months ago, but the public now has a new tragedy to adjust to as the logs reveal the leading weeks up to his demise were not spent in the jovial state we had all naively but rather a state of increasing paranoia and insanity.

Last Log.

I have finally accustomed to life on the Astra. I had a moment of enlightenment this morning, about the loneliness that I think eats at us throughout our lives. I have spent over 100 days staring at the Earth, the Earth in it’s entirety and I think that this gives me rather broad understanding of the people that mill there below. They’re all alone. Every one of us is alone. And here, if I make no noise, all I can here is my little pocket watch, a token from home. It’s rhythmical ticking, dimmed by time. But it reminds me that I’m alone. I can remember the moments in my life when that was all I could hear. Moments when I was physically alone. But I have come to the realisation that it doesn’t matter whether I can hear that ticking or not. We are all alone. Alone in our heads, in our thoughts. I think that maybe these are what these solo missions on the Astra are about. I think I understand it all now.

Rhiannon Whale

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junsojung-text · 6 years ago

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Media and the Order of Senses

Nam See Kim (Assistant Professor, Ewha Womans University)

The Premise of Media

Entering Sojung Jun’s solo exhibition titled Kiss Me Quick at Song Eun Art Space, visitors could feel Barcelona. In this exhibition, there is sensorial memory of the city experienced by Jun with her eyes closed. She walked around the city and recorded what she felt with her sensorial organs except for her eyes. This way, she made her sensory drawings of Barcelona. And then, a musician translated the drawings into music and a choreographer transcribed them into physical movements. Going through the process, her sense of touch and hearing is combined with the sense of sight, which is united with tactile sight of moving bodies. At a glance, it seems that Jun tries an experiment to overcome the limits of our eye-centered culture. In other words, her work seems like a project to call into question widespread ocular-centrism by demonstrating how it has minimized our interest in other senses. This work seems to divert our focus onto diverse physiological capacities of our body. Historically, art has involved in this kind of attempt to resuscitate five senses. Friedrich Schiller analyzed negative effects of the division of labor him and viewed ‘art as play’ as a solution for dealing with the fragmentation and alienation of modern man in ‘civil society’. After Schiller, art was considered to be able to help us recover our fragmented or enfeebled senses and impair our physical and mental integrity. Even today, not a few artists pursue the aim to restore the so-called ‘original state of united senses’. Moreover, it is not uncommon for these artists to move towards spiritualism and mysticism.

Despite certain visual similarities, Jun’s work is distinctly different from the abovementioned artistic lineage. First, Jun’s work is based on media technologies such as video projection. As media theorist Friedrich Kittler points out, technology based media such as photography, gramophone, film, and typewriter divided up once united senses and assigned each a medium-like status. For example, ocular and auditory experience (sight and hearing), which had been united in the creation and reception of a literary work, came to be recorded, saved, and ‘played’ separately in gramophone, photography and film. Through photography and silent movie that send out a set of visual impressions with no sound, and gramophone playing only the sounds of people of events with no image, we got used to image-only and sound-only experience. Our sight and hearing are not working separately in reality, but when it comes to media technology experience, each of the senses can operate independently.

It is noteworthy that after technology media brought about the division of senses, the mutual translation and correspondence between individual senses came to be explored. For instance, Wassily Kandinsky explored the possibility of communication and translation between sounds (auditory senses) and colors (sight) in his painting. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was interested in materialism, suggested a new kind of music based on direct correspondence between the auditory and the visual by inscribing graphic symbols on phonograph record disks.[1]Therefore, it was not by chance that such artistic experiments were created after the appearance of technology-based media like photography, films, and gramophone.

Nevertheless, people calling for the reunification of fragmented and separated senses still stick to the romantic idea of a primitive status of human spirit when all senses were together in unity. For them, the unity of senses is to be ‘recovered’ and ‘rebuilt’. They try to restore the primitive sensorial status in human bodies through diverse spiritualistic and mystical methods. However, their ideas and methods cause head-on confrontation between humans and technology, as they do not understand the dialectical relationship between the two. After the technology based media split up our senses, the reunion between them cannot take place in the manner that romanticists and metaphysicians dream of. This is because after the appearance of technological media, the problem of sensorial integration or synesthesia cannot rely on the concept of ‘spirit’ that is believed to unite the senses of body in the ‘transcendental’ inside. The integration would rather be possible by utilizing the technical media, provoking ‘translation’ or ‘combination’ between different them. The future technology of virtual reality that is to mediate sight between hearing; and touch between smell, does not represent a certain primitive status of human senses. It is nothing but the combined technology of different media senses.

Jun does not refer to things like ‘spirit’ or ‘humans’ when she talks about ‘synesthesia’. Maybe she is fully aware that her work is based on the premise of the technical separation of senses. Instead, Jun sheds light on the ‘translation’ occurring between senses. Moreover, she finds common ground among senses not in human spirit but in the manipulation of media. The interesting aesthetic tension in her work comes from this point of view. In Kiss me quick, Jun tries to weaken visitors’ visual perceptual abilities by turning the lights down in the entire exhibition hall. She also installs structural devices to make the visitors bend their back or lower their bodies. As a result, visitors are forced to experience her works using their bodies and senses. They should walk cautiously down a dark hallway, attempt to reconstruct distorted and fragmented images projected on the wall, and watch a video standing uncomfortably in front of a curved screen. Here, the convention of watching comfortably a visual image centered exhibition does not exist. In her media work, Jun relocates diverse sensorial information manipulating and combining different media,[2]and unites multiple senses in her own way. In other words, she brings about a uniquely united sensorial experience by adeptly arranging diverse (technological) media and isolated sensorial information they convey. Critic Sohyun Ahn says Jun’s method is “indulged in senses.”[3]However, despite the nuance of the word, the indulgence is not intended for an aesthetic self-fulfillment. Through the indulgence of senses, Jun’s works telling us “stories of someone’s loss, limitations, isolation, and fall” try to “translate empirical, linguistic, historical, political, and social date into the order of senses.”[4]Likewise,Story of Dream: Suni(2008) (stories of nurses and coal miners emigrated to Germanyin the 1960s) and Specters (2017) (a work about immigration and boundary issues, and identity problem in the global age) in her exhibition at SeMA Buk Seoul Museum of Art, The Song of My Generation, can be viewed stories translated into ‘the order of senses’.

Specters in the Global Era

Google Map, in this world of images on which one could reach anywhere in the whole world by moving a cursor on the monitor, moving ‘my location’ to somewhere else is possible with a simple click of a mouse. Within a few seconds, the cursor will get to the place on earth where one wants to be. A small pixel clinging to the cursor is a symbol of the virtual ‘I’. The ‘I’ can easily land on anywhere on the map: once ‘I’ do, landscape surrounding the specific location –for instance, the Gulliver Park in Spain- suddenly appears in front of one’s eyes. In that place, we are as free as specters. Due to the worldwide economic crisis in the global age and civil wars breaking out all over the world, immigration is increasing dramatically. According to the UN Refugee Agency, at the end of 2016, the number of global involuntary refugees, 65,600,000, increased by 300,000 compared with the previous year.[5]Between 2008 and 2016, moreover, people applying for refugee status to Korean government increased over twenty times from 364 to 7542.[6]However, the migration of people in the real world is not as easy as moving across the globe on the Google Map to get to a park in Spain. In reality, between ‘my location’ and another place, there are strict border guards and administrative powers protecting their laws and deciding where to offer an entry permit to a refugee or deny his or her entry, or order him or her to leave. Blocked by the powers, hundreds of people trying to move to another place lose their lives in the Mediterranean Sea.

When I try to move place in the imaginary world, my body and words do not function. Even if I come very close to some kids playing in a playing ground, I am invisible to them. They even cannot hear me. However, when it comes to the real world, the story is entirely different. Even though I do not say anything, my appearance and my body deliver information about who I am. Because of my looks, I might be identified as Chinese or Japanese, or Vietnamese. Even when I do not speak a word, a taxi driver would recognize me as an Asian. In case I speak their language, for example, English or French, he or she can ‘see’ something else between my lines.This is because my accent and pronunciation will inform that I am ‘the other’ who do not originally belong to this culture and language, that I am either a foreigner or an immigrant. Regardless of my will, thus, my body, my language, and my accent bear a set of meanings. The meanings decide the area of my mental and social activities, and leave a trace in my existence. Someone might frown at my accent, and someone could feel comfortable about my appearance.The complex interaction created between my looks and my words (or accents) feels powerful.

Time Axis Manipulation

Spectersis the title of Jun’s work where she speaks about the ironic situation in the global era with her signature attitude of indifference. Specters appear both in the past and present. Even if ghosts came from the past, we cannot say that they belong entirely to the past. If something of the past appears in the present, the past is not considered to be completely over. But that doesn’t mean specters exist in the present. If they do, they might not be called specters. Ghosts do not ‘exist’ in the present, but ‘appear (and disappear)’ in the present. The condition of their appearance is different from that of ‘things’ such as coffee cups and plates that we could always see in a kitchen. In this regard, for ghosts, time is a paradoxical thing. They are from the past but appear in the present: they belong to the past but are connected to the present.

Moving images are like specters as every movement we see in them was produced in the past. In front of our eyes, screenings of moving images repeat a set of movements made in the past. Like ghosts, in Jun’s work, the movements of a choreographer appear in front of us, but they are not ‘present’ hear and now just like an object next to us. In a way, we play with them in the present; yet, in reality, they do not exist. For us looking at the screen, the movements being developed in front of our eyes belong to the past. Therefore, we watch the movements developing: movements that have already passed, disappeared, and cannot be repeated in reality.However, this is not the only similarity between the medium of moving images and specters. Moving images can repeat things that have already happened while ghosts can freely cross the temporal boundary between the past and present. We can play moving images ‘counterclockwise’. To be more specific, we can return time to the point before things happened, as it is described in the following sentence:

“Grandmother’s inn was being rebuilt. As if someone were clicking on the rewind button using the Final Cut Pro program, I was able to see with my eyes the succession of short scenes showing the bricks in the dilapidated building returned to their original place, one by one.”

The scenes showing the reconstruction of grandmother’s inn do not describe a memory of the past. Memory can let us jump into a moment of the past or replay a moment in time suddenly, sporadically, randomly, and rapidly. Nevertheless, no matter what, we cannot play our memory of the past backwards. That means our reflection on the past follows the linear flow of time. Therefore, the images played backwards are not to do with how our memory operates. The reversal of time can be realized only through the technical manipulation of the progress of moving images. Kittler calls this process ‘Time Axis Manipulation’ and sees it as one of the most important capabilities of the technical media. Jun makes the most of this media technology that helps her counter the irreversible flow of time where every living organism and thing on earth belong. Thus, in her work, the pieces from a collapsed building return to their proper places, a squashed up coin regains its original shape, and a wall we passed by riding on a train comes back before our eyes. But sadly, through all these things, one cannot but sense the irreversibility of time much more vividly than before.

[1]L. Moholy-Nagy, “Neue Gestaltung in Musik. Möglichkeit des Grammophons”, Der Sturm, Juli 1923 [2]See Nam See Kim, “New Familiarity, Old Unfamiliarity: Sojung Jun’s Media Work”, Video Portrait, Total Museum [3]See Sohyun Ahn, Sojun Jun’s“Kiss me Quick” Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Senses [4]See Sohyun Ahn, Sojun Jun’s“Kiss me Quick” Limitation-Rise-Indulgence of Sense [5]http://www.unhcr.org/global-trends-2016-media.html [6]http://www.index.go.kr/potal/main/EachDtlPageDetail.do?idx_cd=2820

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bethanylf-art · 7 years ago

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Self-Expression Through Pop, Minimalism & Conceptual Art

This lecture briefly went over Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art to explain neither subjectivity nor objectivity, but rather a whole new meaning for art altogether- self-expression.

Clement Greenberg believed that making art about the medium was important (medium specificity), but as the years went on, circumstances changed and mixed media (as well as new reasons/ideas to make art) became prominent in the art world. Mixed media fails to be modernist; because there is no medium purity, there is more of a chance that the work cannot be seen as totally functional (perhaps more medium equals more focus to form or ornamentation and therefore strays from modernist art). The rise of mixed media- especially in these three movements- meant there was more room for structural pieces that embraced all of the possibilities of form. There was no care nor need for functionality because that was not a goal.

Pop Art

I always love learning about and researching Pop Art, for it celebrates consumerism and the popular culture during its time of popularity. I understand that Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych is a tired and non-perfect example of American Pop Art, but the theme of death in this work, to me, intends that celebrities (as well as his artwork, perhaps) are more than meets the eye. However, maybe Warhol did not mean to humanise Marilyn; maybe all he wanted to do was sensationalise her death (or even simply bring it to attention) the same way she lived- plastered repeatedly. I suppose re-personifying the symbol she became is something I am doing myself and Warhol never intended to have this piece come across that way.

According to the Tate, the repetitiveness of the starlet represents her constant presence in the media (much like the mass advertisement/production of the many flavours of Campbell’s Soup Cans- a common household item) and the black and white/fading effect on the right suggests her mortality.

In Lindsay Ellis’ mini video essay on Marilyn Monroe, she interprets that the black and white part of the work represents Norma Jean- her ‘normal’, ‘human’ self- and the vivid side represents Marilyn Monroe. I find Ellis’ video very informative and thought-provoking- it sheds light on how we see Monroe as a symbol rather than a person, and I suppose that is why her untimely death was so tragic; Norma Jean was a person with problems and the audience could never see it. Marilyn was, is, and will always be a symbol of many things- glamour, pop culture, and eventually, even tragedy- mass-produced like a soup can onto every film and television screen, seen by everyone and yet known by very few, if anyone.

Warhol’s themes of death, the media, consumerism and the cult of celebrity personally interest me greatly. I could even use these themes as puzzle pieces of sorts for my Power to the People brief. My zine is about anti-establishment, so maybe I can incorporate those subjects somehow. In the lecture, it was said that Warhol used repetitiveness to numb the response of death, which is admittedly more compelling than using repetitiveness as simply a nod to the amount of mass-production that pop culture can ultimately cause.

Minimalism

Minimalism is an interesting movement that, in my opinion, should be simple in theory, but seems much too mathematically complex for me to mimic. Minimalism uses geometric shapes and even blurs the line between painting and sculpture.

Above, greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin’s work using lights are quite aesthetically pleasing. I had never thought of using light and bulbs in a piece, but the way his are arranged emit a feeling of warmth, as fluorescent as they are (some lights are warmer/brighter- metaphorically as well as literally- than others due to bulb colour and wattage variants). I think his art reminds me of nightlife. Those works of his may have a totally different meaning and reason for existing than other fluorescent signs (which I also find inspiration in), but this part of the lecture, for me, was about getting excited over strange- yet new- ideas.

According to artist Donald Judd, the materials used were exactly what they were- they were not expressive. There are other ideas in Minimalism such as Robert Morris’ opinion that there is no perception without a body, hence the uniqueness of his mirrored cubes, Untitled, above. Something about these sparked my interest- though I am not really sure why. Part of me saw these and was reminded of those modern art pieces that were seen in houses of the wealthy in magazines and movies, next to massive expensive-modern-house windows and probably missing the point of the movement altogether. When I saw these cubes, however, I was also excited to see something quite new and learn why these types of pieces exist. What could four mirrored cubes mean? What was the purpose? If they are not expressive, what are they? If one thing is for sure, they weren’t just for sitting in rich people’s houses to look aesthetically matching in their expensive modern home. There were ideas tied to these initially confusing works- and understanding why such different-looking pieces exist seems like a fun treasure hunt of sorts.

Conceptual Art

If Pop Art is the flesh and Minimalist art is the skeleton, then Conceptual art is probably the soul; perhaps it does not exist or cannot be visible- it is a concept. Apparently, the ideas themselves are the art and the medium is taken away, but work is still hung in galleries. However, perhaps that is not what is meant by “the medium is taken away”. Personally, conceptual art is difficult to wrap my brain around.

Above, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Edward Ruscha

Ed Ruscha took non-professional photos of gas stations as a collection of facts- a representation of the everyday/the banal, and maybe that was the point, that was the art itself; the concept of simply capturing banality. In a way, this idea- as well as this movement- can make art more accessible to those less skilful (not that I believe that Ruscha is less skilful than other photographers) or to those with very specific and different ideas of art. However, I also do believe that if one is to produce conceptual art, the artist must know the concept they are going for. There is no point in making nor seeing purposeless (unless that is the purpose) conceptual art. Just because many non-professional photos of gas stations seems like no work at all (to some), does not mean that Ruscha’s work is any less legitimate, for the work is more about the idea than the piece itself... and even then, I am fond of the piece anyway, no matter how easy or difficult it may or may not have been.

With my Image Manipulation module as well as my Graphic Design module, I could use my amateur photography ‘skills’ as a medium (I obviously definitely will with Digital Imaging). My Power to the People brief for Graphic Design could include photography on its own or even elements of photography- collage, for example. Collage is popular amongst punk-inspired art.

#pdp #lectures #image manipulation #graphic design processes

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d33-alex · 7 years ago

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Why Freud Survives?!

He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up!

Sigmund Freud almost didn’t make it out of Vienna in 1938. He left on June 4th, on the Orient Express, three months after the German Army entered the city. Even though the persecution of Viennese Jews had begun immediately—Edward R. Murrow, in Vienna for CBS radio when the Germans arrived, was an eyewitness to the ransacking of Jewish homes—Freud had resisted pleas from friends that he flee. He changed his mind after his daughter Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. He was able to get some of his family out, but he left four sisters behind. All of them died in the camps, one, of starvation, at Theresienstadt; the others, probably by gas, at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

London was Freud’s refuge, and friends set him up in Hampstead, in a big house that is now the Freud Museum. On January 28, 1939, Virginia and Leonard Woolf came for tea. The Woolfs, the founders and owners of the Hogarth Press, had been Freud’s British publishers since 1924; Hogarth later published the twenty-four-volume translation of Freud’s works, under the editorship of Anna Freud and James Strachey, that is known as the Standard Edition. This was the Woolfs’ only meeting with Freud.

English was one of Freud’s many languages. (After he settled in Hampstead, the BBC taped him speaking, the only such recording in existence.) But he was eighty-two and suffering from cancer of the jaw, and conversation with the Woolfs was awkward. He “was sitting in a great library with little statues at a large scrupulously tidy shiny table,” Virginia wrote in her diary. “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.” He was formal and courteous in an old-fashioned way, and presented her with a narcissus. The stage had been carefully set.

The Woolfs were not easily impressed by celebrity, and certainly not by stage setting. They understood the transactional nature of the tea. “All refugees are like gulls with their beaks out for possible crumbs,” Virginia coolly noted in the diary. But many years later, in his autobiography, Leonard remembered that Freud had given him a feeling that, he said, “only a very few people whom I have met gave me, a feeling of great gentleness, but behind the gentleness, great strength. . . . A formidable man.” Freud died in that house on September 23, 1939, three weeks after the start of the Second World War.

Hitler and Stalin, between them, drove psychoanalysis out of Europe, but the movement reconstituted itself in two places where its practitioners were welcomed, London and New York. A product of Mitteleuropa, once centered in cities like Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, and Moscow, psychoanalysis was thus improbably transformed into a largely Anglo-American medical and cultural phenomenon. During the twelve years that Hitler was in power, only about fifty Freudian analysts immigrated to the United States (a country Freud had visited only once, and held in contempt). They were some of the biggest names in the field, though, and they took over American psychiatry. After the war, Freudians occupied university chairs; they dictated medical-school curricula; they wrote the first two editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). Psychoanalytic theory guided the treatment of hospital patients, and, by the mid-nineteen-fifties, half of all hospital patients in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders.

Most important, psychoanalysis helped move the treatment of mental illness from the asylum and the hospital to the office. Psychoanalysis is a talk therapy, which meant that people who were otherwise functioning normally could avail themselves of treatment. The greater the number of people who wanted that kind of therapy, the greater the demand for therapists, and the postwar decades were a boom time for psychiatry. In 1940, two-thirds of American psychiatrists worked in hospitals; in 1956, seventeen per cent did. Twelve and a half per cent of American medical students chose psychiatry as a profession in 1954, an all-time high. A large percentage of them received at least some psychoanalytic training, and by 1966 three-quarters reported that they used the “dynamic approach” when treating patients.

The dynamic approach is based on the cardinal Freudian principle that the sources of our feelings are hidden from us, that what we say about them when we walk into the therapist’s office cannot be what is really going on. What is really going on are things that we are denying or repressing or sublimating or projecting onto the therapist by the mechanism of transference, and the goal of therapy is to bring those things to light.

Amazingly, Americans, a people stereotypically allergic to abstract systems, found this model of the mind irresistible. Many scholars have tried to explain why, and there are, no doubt, multiple reasons, but the explanation offered by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann is simple: alternative theories were worse. “Freud’s theories were like a flashlight in a candle factory,” as she puts it. Freudian concepts were taken up by intellectuals, who wrote about cathexes, screen memories, and reaction formations, and they were absorbed into popular discourse. People who had never read a word of Freud talked confidently about the superego, the Oedipus complex, and penis envy.

Freud was recruited to the anti-utopian politics of the nineteen-fifties. Intellectuals like Lionel Trilling, in “Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture,” and Philip Rieff, in “Freud: The Mind of the Moralist,” maintained that Freud taught us about the limits on human perfectibility. Popular magazines equated Freud with Copernicus and Darwin. Claims were large. “Will the Twentieth Century go down in history as the Freudian Century?” asked the editor of a volume called “Freud and the Twentieth Century,” in 1957. “May not the new forms of awareness growing out of Freud’s work come to serve as a more authentic symbol of our consciousness and the quality of our deepest experience than the uncertain fruits of the fission of the atom and the new charting of the cosmos?”

Professors in English departments naturally wondered how they might get in on the action. They did not have much trouble finding a way. For it is not a stretch to treat literary texts in the same way that an analyst treats what a patient is saying. Although teachers dislike the term “hidden meanings,” decoding a subtext or exposing an implicit meaning or ideology is what a lot of academic literary criticism does. Academic critics are therefore always in the market for a theoretical apparatus that can give coherence and consistency to this enterprise, and Freudianism was ideally suited for the task. Decoding and exposing are what psychoanalysis is all about.

One professor excited about the possibilities was Frederick Crews. Crews received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1958 with a dissertation on E. M. Forster. The dissertation explained what Forster thought by looking at what Forster wrote. It was plain-vanilla history-of-ideas criticism, and Crews found it boring. As an undergraduate, at Yale, he had fallen in love with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche had led him to Freud. By the time the Forster book came out, in 1962, he was a professor at Berkeley, and his second book, “The Sins of the Fathers,” was a psychoanalytic study of Nathaniel Hawthorne. It came out in 1966, and, along with Norman Holland’s “Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare,” published the same year, was one of the pioneering works in psychoanalytic literary criticism. Crews began teaching a popular graduate seminar on the subject.

He also got involved in the antiwar movement on campus, serving as a co-chair of the Faculty Peace Committee. Like many people at Berkeley in those days, he became radicalized, and he considered his interest in Freud to be part of his radicalism. He thought that Freud, as he later put it, “licensed a spirit of dogmatically rebellious interpretation.” In fact, Freud was dismissive of radical politics. He thought that the belief that social change could make people healthier or happier was deluded; that is the point of “Civilization and Its Discontents.” But Crews’s idea that Freudianism was somehow liberatory was widely shared in the sixties (although it usually required some tweaks to the theory, as administered, for example, by writers like Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown).

In 1970, Crews published an anthology of essays promoting psychoanalytic criticism, “Psychoanalysis and Literary Process.” But he had started to get cold feet. He had soured on radical politics, too—by the early seventies, “Berkeley” had pretty much reverted to being “Cal,” a politically quiescent campus—and his experience with his graduate seminar had begun to make him think that there was something too easy about psychoanalytic criticism. Students would propose contradictory psychoanalytic readings, and they all sounded good, but it was just an ingenuity contest. There was no way to prove that one interpretation was truer than another. From this, it followed that what was going on in the analyst’s office might also be nothing more than a kind of interpretive freelancing. Psychoanalysis was beginning to look like a circular and self-justifying methodology.

Crews registered his growing disillusionment in a collection of essays that came out in 1975, “Out of My System.” He still believed that there were redeemable aspects to Freud’s thought, but he was on his way out, as a second essay collection, “Skeptical Engagements,” in 1986, made clear. In 1993, with the publication of a piece in The New York Review of Books called “The Unknown Freud,” he emerged as a full-blown critic of Freudianism and a leader in a group of revisionist scholars known as the Freud-bashers.

The article was a review of several books by revisionists. Psychoanalysis had already been discredited as a medical science, Crews wrote; what researchers were now revealing was that Freud himself was possibly a charlatan—an opportunistic self-dramatizer who deliberately misrepresented the scientific bona fides of his theories. He followed up with another article in the Review, on recovered-memory cases—cases in which adults had been charged with sexual abuse on the basis of supposedly repressed memories elicited from children—which he blamed on Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

Crews’s articles triggered one of the most rancorous highbrow free-for-alls ever run in a paper that has published its share of them. Letters of supreme huffiness poured into the Review, the writers lamenting that considerations of space prevented them from pointing out more than a handful of Crews’s errors and misrepresentations, and then proceeding to take up many column inches enumerating them.

People who send aggrieved letters to the Review often seem to have missed the fact that the Review always gives its writers the last word, and Crews availed himself of the privilege with relish and at length. He gave, on balance, better than he got. In 1995, he published his Review pieces as “The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute.” Three years later, he edited “Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend,” an anthology of writings by Freud’s critics. Crews had retired from teaching in 1994, and is now an emeritus professor at Berkeley.

The arc of Freud’s American reputation tracks the arc of Crews’s career. Psychoanalytic theory reached the peak of its impact in the late fifties, when Crews was switching from history-of-ideas criticism to psychoanalytic criticism, and it began to fade in the late sixties, when Crews was starting to notice a certain circularity in his graduate students’ papers. Part of the decline had to do with social change. Freudianism was a big target for writers associated with the women’s movement; it was attacked as sexist (justifiably) by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” and by Kate Millett in “Sexual Politics,” as it had been, more than a decade earlier, by Simone de Beauvoir in “The Second Sex.”

Psychoanalysis was also taking a hit within the medical community. Studies suggesting that psychoanalysis had a low cure rate had been around for a while. But the realization that depression and anxiety can be regulated by medication made a mode of therapy whose treatment times reached into the hundreds of billable hours seem, at a minimum, inefficient, and, at worst, a scam.

Managed-care companies and the insurance industry certainly drew that conclusion, and the third edition of the DSM, in 1980, scrubbed out almost every trace of Freudianism. The third edition was put together by a group of psychiatrists at Washington University, where, it is said, a framed picture of Freud was mounted above a urinal in the men’s room. In 1999, a study published in American Psychologist reported that “psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream scientific psychology over the past several decades.”

Meanwhile, the image of Freud as a lonely pioneer began to erode as well. That image had been carefully curated by Freud’s disciples, especially by Freud’s first biographer, the Welsh analyst Ernest Jones, who was a close associate. (He had flown to Vienna after the Nazis arrived to urge Freud to flee.) Jones’s three-volume life came out in the nineteen-fifties. But the image originated with, and was cultivated by, Freud himself. Even his little speech for the BBC, in 1938, is about the heavy price he has paid for his findings (he calls them “facts”) and his struggle against continued resistance to them.

In the nineteen-seventies, historians like Henri Ellenberger and Frank Sulloway pointed out that most of Freud’s ideas about the unconscious were not original, and that his theories relied on outmoded concepts from nineteenth-century biology, like the belief in the inheritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckianism). In 1975, the Nobel Prize-winning medical biologist Peter Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”

One corner of Anglo-American intellectual life where Freudianism had always been regarded with suspicion was the philosophy department. A few philosophers, like Stanley Cavell, who had an interest in literature and Continental thinkers took Freud up. But to philosophers of science the knowledge claims of psychoanalysis were always dubious. In 1985, one of them, Adolf Grünbaum, at the University of Pittsburgh, published “The Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” a dauntingly thorough exposition designed to show that, whatever the foundations of psychoanalysis were, they were not scientific.

Revisionist attention also turned to Freud’s biography. The lead bloodhound on this trail was Peter Swales, a man who once called himself “the punk historian of psychoanalysis.” Swales never finished high school; in the nineteen-sixties, he worked as a personal assistant to the Rolling Stones. That would seem a hard gig to bail on, but he did, and, around 1972, he got interested in Freud and decided to devote himself to unearthing anything and everything associated with Freud’s life. (Swales is one of the two figures—the other is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson—profiled in Janet Malcolm’s smart and entertaining report on the Freud revisionists, “In the Freud Archives,” published in 1984.)

Swales’s most spectacular claim was that Freud impregnated his sister-in-law, Minna, arranged for her to have an abortion, and then encoded the whole affair in a fictitious case history—a Sherlockian story that was almost too good to check (though some corroborating evidence was later dug up). Swales and other researchers were also able to show that Freud consistently misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments he based his theories on. In the case of one of the only patients whose treatment notes Freud did not destroy, Ernst Lanzer—the Rat Man—it is clear that he misrepresented the facts as well. In a study of the forty-three treatments about which some information survives, it turned out that Freud had broken his own rules for how to conduct an analysis, usually egregiously, in all forty-three.

In 1983, a British researcher, E. M. Thornton, published “Freud and Cocaine,” in which she argued that Freud, who early in his career was a champion of the medical uses of cocaine (then a legal and popular drug), was effectively addicted to it in the years before he wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Freud treated a friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, with cocaine to cure a morphine habit, with the result that Fleischl became addicted to both drugs and died at the age of forty-five. Thornton suggested that Freud was often high on cocaine when he wrote his early scientific articles, which accounts for their sloppiness with the data and the recklessness of their claims.

By 1995, enough evidence of the doubtfulness of psychoanalysis’s scientific credentials and enough questions about Freud’s character had accumulated to enable the revisionists to force the postponement of a major exhibition devoted to Freud at the Library of Congress, on the ground that the show presented psychoanalysis in too favorable a light. Crews called it an effort “to polish up the tarnished image of a business that’s heading into Chapter 11.” The exhibition had to be redesigned, and it did not open until 1998.

That year, in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud. “Absolutely,” he said. “After almost twenty years of explaining and illustrating the same basic critique, I will just refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical Engagements,’ ‘The Memory Wars,’ and ‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is unmoved by my reasoning there isn’t going to be touched by anything further I might say.” He spoke too soon.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. Freud might be like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in the first act and then shows up for dinner at the end, the Stone Guest. So Crews spent eleven years writing “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” (Metropolitan), just out—a six-hundred-and-sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s cold, cold heart.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers (fully acknowledged), and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania. He evidently regards “balance” as a pass given to chicanery, and even readers sympathetic to the argument may find it hard to get all the way through the book. It ought to come with a bulb of garlic.

The place where people interested in Freud’s thought usually begin is “The Interpretation of Dreams,” which came out in 1899, when Freud was forty-three. Crews doesn’t get to that book until page 533. The only subsequent work he discusses in depth is the so-called Dora case, which was based on an (aborted) treatment that Freud conducted in 1900 with a woman named Ida Bauer, and which he published in 1905, as “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” Crews touches briefly on the other famous case histories Freud brought out before the First World War—the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans, the analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber, and the book on Leonardo da Vinci. The hugely influential works of social psychology that Freud went on to write—“Totem and Taboo,” “The Future of an Illusion,” “Civilization and Its Discontents”—are largely ignored.

The “illusion” in Crews’s subtitle isn’t Freudianism, though. It’s Freud. For many years, Freud was written about as an intrepid scientist who dared to descend into the foul rag-and-bone shop of the mind, and who emerged as the embodiment of a tragic wisdom—a man who could face up to the terrible fact that a narcissus is never just a narcissus, that underneath the mind’s trapdoor is a snake pit of desire and aggression, and, knowing all this, was still able to take tea with his guests. In Yeats’s line, those ancient, glittering eyes were gay. This is, obviously, the reputation the Woolfs carried with them when they went to meet Freud in 1939.

As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis. For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.

Is there anything new to say about this person? One of the occasions for Crews’s book is the fairly recent emergence of Freud’s correspondence with his fiancée, Martha Bernays. Freud got engaged in 1882, when he was twenty-six, and the engagement lasted four years. He and Martha spent most of that time in different cities, and Freud wrote to her virtually every day. Some fifteen hundred letters survive. Crews makes a great deal of the correspondence, and he finds much to disapprove of.

Who would want to be judged by letters sent to a lover? What the excerpts that Crews quotes seem to show us is an immature and unguarded young man who is ambitious and insecure, boastful and needy, ardent and impatient—all the ways people tend to come across in love letters. Freud makes remarks like “I intend to exploit science instead of allowing myself to be exploited by it.” Crews takes this to expose Freud’s mercenary attitude toward his vocation. But young people want to make a living. That’s why they have vocations. The reason for the prolonged engagement was that Freud couldn’t afford to marry. It’s not surprising that he would have wanted to assure his fiancée that his eyes were ever on the prize.

Freud mentions cocaine often in the letters. He used it to get through stressful social situations, but he also appreciated its benefits as an aphrodisiac, and Crews quotes from several letters in which he teases Martha about its effects. “Woe to you, little princess, when I come,” he writes in one. “I will kiss you quite red and feed you quite plump. And if you are naughty you will see who is stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn’t eat or a big wild man with cocaine in his body.” Crews’s gloss: Freud “conceived of his chemically eroticized self not as the affectionate companion of a dear person but as a powerful mate who would have his way, luxuriating in the crushing of maidenly reluctance.” (Freud, incidentally, was a small man, five feet seven inches. He was taller than Martha, but not by much. The “big wild man” was a joke.)

Freud would be the last person to have grounds for objecting to a biographer’s interest in his sex life, but Crews’s claims in this area are often speculation. During his engagement, for example, Freud spent four months studying in Paris, where he sometimes suffered from anxiety. “It is easy to picture how Freud’s agitation must have been heightened by the daily parade of saucy faces and swaying hips that he witnessed during his strolls,” Crews observes. Crews is confident that Freud, during his separation from Martha, masturbated regularly, “making himself sick with guilt over it” (something he says Freud’s biographers covered up). He also suspects that Freud had sex with a prostitute, and was therefore not a virgin when, at the age of thirty, he finally got married. Noting (as others have) the homoerotic tone in Freud’s letters to and about men he was close to—Fleischl and, later, Wilhelm Fliess—Crews suggests that Freud “wrestled with homosexual impulses.”

Let’s assume that Freud used cocaine as an anxiolytic and aphrodisiac. That he had an eye for sexy women. That he masturbated, solicited a prostitute, shared he-man fantasies with his girlfriend, and got crushes on male friends. Who cares? Human beings do these things. Even if Freud had sex with Minna Bernays—so what? The standard revisionist hypothesis is that the sex took place on trips that the two took together without Martha, of which, as Crews points out, there were a surprising number. But Crews imagines assignations in the family home in Vienna as well. He notes that Minna’s bedroom was in a far corner of the house, meaning that “the nocturnal Sigmund could have visited it with impunity in predawn hours.” Could he have? Apparently. Should he have? Probably not. Did he, in fact? No one knows. So why fantasize about it? A Freudian would suspect that there is something going on here.

One thing that’s going on is straightforward enough: this is internecine business in the Freud wars. Some Freud scholar floated the suggestion that since Minna’s bedroom was next to Freud and Martha’s, there would have been few opportunities for hanky-panky. Consistent with his policy of giving scoundrels no quarter, Crews is determined to blow that suggestion out of the water. He is on a crusade to debunk what he calls “Freudolatry,” the cult of Freud constructed and maintained by the “home-team historians.” These include the “house biographer” Ernest Jones, the “gullible” Peter Gay, and the “loyalists” George Makari and Élisabeth Roudinesco. (The English translation of Roudinesco’s “Freud: In His Time and Ours” was published by Harvard last fall.)

In Crews’s view, these people have created a Photoshopped image of superhuman scientific probity and moral rectitude, and it’s important to take their hero down to human size—or maybe, in compensation for all the years of hype, a size or two smaller. Their Freud, fully cognizant of his illicit desires, stops at his sister-in-law’s bedroom door, for he knows that sublimation of the erotic drives is the price men pay for civilization. Crews’s Freud just walks right in. (In either account, civilization somehow survives.)

For readers with less skin in the Freud wars, the question is: What is at stake? And the answer has to be Freudianism—the theory itself and its post-clinical afterlife. Although Freud renounced his early work on cocaine, Crews examines it carefully, and he shows that, from the beginning, Freud was a lousy scientist. He fudged data; he made unsubstantiated claims; he took credit for other people’s ideas. Sometimes he lied. A lot of people in the late nineteenth century believed that cocaine might be a miracle drug, and Crews may be a little unfair when he tries to pin much of the blame for the later epidemic of cocaine abuse on Freud. Still, even starting out, Freud showed himself to be a man who did not have much in the way of professional scruples. The fundamental claim of the revisionists is that Freud never changed. It was bogus science all the way. And the central issue for most of them is what is known as the seduction theory.

The principal reason psychoanalysis triumphed over alternative theories and was taken up in fields outside medicine, like literary criticism, is that it presented its findings as inductive. Freudian theory was not a magic-lantern show, an imaginative projection that provided us with powerful metaphors for understanding the human condition. It was not “Paradise Lost”; it was science, a conceptual system wholly derived from clinical experience.

For Freudians and anti-Freudians alike, the key to this claim is the fate of the seduction theory. According to the official narrative, when Freud began working with women diagnosed with hysteria, in the eighteen-nineties, his patients reported being sexually molested as children, usually by their fathers and usually when they were under the age of four. In 1896, Freud delivered a paper announcing that, having completed eighteen treatments, he had concluded that sexual abuse in infancy was the source of hysterical symptoms. This became known as the seduction theory.

The paper was greeted with derision. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the leading sexologist of the day, called it “a scientific fairy tale.” Freud was discouraged. But, in 1897, he had a revelation, which he reported in a letter to Fliess that became canonical. Patients were not remembering actual molestation, he realized; they were remembering their own sexual fantasies. The reason was the Oedipus complex. From infancy, all children have aggressive and erotic feelings about their parents, but they repress those feelings out of fear of punishment. For boys, the fear is of castration; girls, as they are traumatized eventually to discover, are already castrated. (“Castration” in Freud means amputation.)

In Freud’s hydraulic model of the mind, these forbidden wishes and desires are psychic energies seeking an outlet. Since they cannot be expressed or acted upon directly—we cannot kill or have sex with our parents—they emerge in highly censored and distorted forms as images in dreams, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms. Freud claimed his clinical experience taught him that, by the method of free association, patients could uncover what they had repressed and achieve some relief. And so psychoanalysis was born.

This narrative was challenged by Jeffrey Masson, whose battle with the Freud establishment is the main subject of Janet Malcolm’s book. In “The Assault on Truth,” in 1984, Masson argued that, panicked by the reaction to his hysteria paper, Freud came up with the theory of infantile sexuality as a way of covering up his patients’ sexual abuse.

But there turned out to be two problems with the official narrative about the seduction theory, and Masson’s was not one of them. The first problem is that the chronology is a retrospective reconstruction. Freud did not abandon the seduction theory after 1897, he did not insist on the centrality of the Oedipus complex until 1908, and so on. Various emendations had to be discreetly made in the Standard Edition, and in the edition of Freud’s correspondence with Fliess, for the record to become consistent with the preferred chronology.

That is the minor problem. The major problem, according to the revisionists, is that there were no cases. Contrary to what Freud claimed and what Masson assumed, none of Freud’s subsequent patients spontaneously told him that they had been molested—those eighteen cases did not exist—and no patients subsequently reported having Oedipal wishes. Knowing of his reputation as sex-obsessed, some of Freud’s patients produced the kind of material they knew he wanted to hear, and a few appear to have been deliberately gaming him. In other cases, Freud badgered patients into accepting his interpretations, and they either gave in, like the Rat Man, or left treatment, like Dora. If your analyst tells you that you are in denial about wanting to sleep with your father, what are you going to do? Deny it?

Ever since he stopped teaching his Berkeley seminar, Crews has complained about the suggestibility of the psychoanalytic method of free association. It replaced hypnosis as a way of treating hysterical patients, but it wasn’t much better. That is why Crews wrote about the recovered-memory cases, in which investigators seem to have fed children the memories they eventually “recovered.” How effective a therapist Freud was is disputed—many people travelled to Vienna to be analyzed by him. But Crews believes that Freud never had “a single ex-patient who could attest to the capacity of the psychoanalytic method to yield the specific effects that he claimed for it.”

One response to the assault on psychoanalysis is that even if Freud mostly made it up, and even if he was a poor therapist himself, psychoanalysis does work for some patients. But so does placebo. Many people suffering from mood disorders benefit from talk therapy and other interpersonal forms of treatment because they respond to the perception that they are being cared for. It may not matter very much what they talk about; someone is listening.

People also find appealing the idea that they have motives and desires they are unaware of. That kind of “depth” psychology was popularized by Freudianism, and it isn’t likely to go away. It can be useful to be made to realize that your feelings about people you love are actually ambivalent, or that you were being aggressive when you thought you were only being extremely polite. Of course, you shouldn’t have to work your way through your castration anxiety to get there.

Still, assuming that psychoanalysis was a dead end, did it set psychiatry back several generations? Crews has said so. “If much of the twentieth century has indeed belonged to Freud,” he told Todd Dufresne, in 1998, “then we lost about seventy years worth of potential gains in knowledge while befuddling ourselves with an essentially medieval conception of the ‘possessed’ mind.” The comment reflects an attitude present in a lot of criticism of psychoanalysis, Crews’s especially: an idealization of science.

Since the third edition of the DSM, the emphasis has been on biological explanations for mental disorders, and this makes psychoanalysis look like a detour, or, as the historian of psychiatry Edward Shorter called it, a “hiatus.” But it wasn’t as though psychiatry was on solid medical ground when Freud came along. Nineteenth-century science of the mind was a Wild West show. Treatments included hypnosis, electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, full-body massage, painkillers like morphine, rest cures, “fat” cures (excessive feeding), seclusion, “female castration,” and, of course, institutionalization. There was also serious interest in the paranormal. The most prevalent nineteenth-century psychiatric diagnoses, hysteria and neurasthenia, are not even recognized today. That wasn’t “bad” science. It was science. Some of it works; a lot of it does not. Psychoanalysis was not the first talk therapy, but it was the bridge from hypnosis to the kind of talk therapy we have today. It did not abuse the patient’s body, and if it was a quack treatment it was not much worse, and was arguably more humane, than a lot of what was being practiced.

Nor did psychoanalysis put a halt to somatic psychiatry. During the first half of the twentieth century, all kinds of medical interventions for mental disorders were devised and put into practice. These included the administration of sedatives, notably chloral, which is addictive, and which was prescribed for Virginia Woolf, who suffered from major depression; insulin-induced comas; electroshock treatments; and lobotomies. Despite its frightful reputation, electroconvulsive therapy is an effective treatment for severe depression, but most of the other treatments in use before the age of psychopharmaceuticals were dead ends. Even today, in many cases, we are basically throwing chemicals at the brain and hoping for the best. Hit or miss is how a lot of progress is made. You can call it science or not.

People write biographies because they hope that lives have lessons. That’s what Crews has done. He believes that the story of Freud’s early life has something to tell us about Freudianism, and although he insists on playing the part of a hanging judge, much of what he has to say about the slipperiness of Freud’s character and the factitiousness of his science is persuasive. He is, after all, building on top of a mountain of research on those topics.

Crews does bring what appears to be a novel charge (at least these days) against psychoanalysis. He argues that it is anti-Christian. By promulgating a doctrine that makes “sexual gratification triumphant over virtuous sacrifice for heaven,” he says, Freud “meant to overthrow the whole Christian order, earning payback for all of the bigoted popes, the sadists of the Inquisition, the modern promulgators of ‘blood libel’ slander, and the Catholic bureaucrats who had held his professorship hostage.” Freud set out to “pull down the temple of Pauline law.”

Crews suggests that this is why the affair with Minna was significant. If it did happen, it was right before Freud wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams,” the real start of Freudianism. Forbidden sex could have given him the confidence he needed to take the extreme step into mind reading. “To possess Minna,” Crews says, “could have meant, first, to commit symbolic incest with the mother of God; second, to ‘kill’ the father God by means of this ultimate sacrilege; and third, to nullify the authority both of Austria’s established church and of its Vatican parent—thereby, in Freud’s internal drama, freeing his people from two millennia of religious persecution.” Then I guess he didn’t just walk right in.

It all sounds pretty Freudian! Where is it coming from? This idol-smashing Freud is radically different from the Freud of writers like Trilling and Rieff, who saw him as the enduring reminder of the futility of imagining that improving the world can make human beings happier. And it is certainly not how Freud presented himself. “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet,” he wrote at the end of “Civilization and Its Discontents,” “and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom, that is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.”

Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was Christianity appears to be a late fruit of his old undergraduate fascination with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once saw Freud as a Nietzschean critic of life-denying moralism, a heroic Antichrist dedicated to liberating human beings from subservience to idols they themselves created. Is his current renunciation a renunciation of his own radical youth? Is his castigation of Freud really a form of self-castigation? We don’t need to go there. But since humanity is not liberated from its illusions yet, if that’s what Freud was really all about, he is still undead.

By Louis Menand | August 28, 2017 issue of The New Yorker

https://goo.gl/qT6ieT

#science #psychology #sigmund freud

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devinamehtaps · 8 years ago

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Interview with Christian Hopkins

We at platform PHOTO recently had the pleasure of interviewing young photographer Christian Hopkins, whose images experiment with combining self-portraiture and conceptual techniques, achieving dramatic and emotive results. Christian’s path into the photographic world was instigated when he received a camera as a gift and despite his reservations, forced himself to start photographing. Photography made him see the world in a more beautiful light and soon became a tool for Christian in battling his demons, providing a form of therapy in coping with his depression and allowing him a channel to communicate his emotions. Here, Christian opens up to us, offering an insight into his often arduous and meticulously thought out photographic process.

platformPHOTO: Hi Christian, please tell us about yourself, your life and how you discovered photography.

Christian Hopkins: It’s difficult to talk about myself with any sort of brevity, not quite because I have so much to say about myself, rather, talking about myself and my life in such a small space means I need to identify the most defining aspects of myself and how I’ve spent the last 20 years on this earth. I can say with confidence that I cannot confidently say I know what those are. I had always been a wallflower. My opinions were simply a reflection of whoever was speaking to me, and to describe my true self was akin to describing the color of a mirror. Ironically, I had simultaneously held a feverish desire to break away from the mundane and seek undiscovered beauty. I was often called the “creative” one whenever I was in a situation that involved art or expression because I was never satisfied with taking the obvious path and becoming forgettable. I wanted to take that path and mold it, twist it into something that was beautiful, yet made you question the reality of the path itself. Indirectly, it was that desire that got me into photography. I was going on a trip to China and my mom bought me a high-end point-and-shoot that I wanted nothing to do with. Since I was stuck with the thing, I forced myself to take a lot of pictures out of guilt for this “gift.” Of course, I didn’t want to just take pictures, I wanted to take GOOD pictures, or at least try to. Some might say being glued to your viewfinder while on vacation makes you “miss the moment,” but for me it magnified it. I started noticing things like complimentary colors, interesting perspectives, the behavior of light, and everything before me became richer. Since then, that lens became my third eye with which the world become so much more beautiful.

platformPHOTO: Your photographs come across as beautiful and somewhat haunting. To you, what makes a good photograph?

Christian Hopkins: I actually have a mini checklist that I go through when both creating and viewing photographs. It’s all still a bit amorphous, but I’ll assign a handful of attributes to a photograph, and I’ll like a photograph if each of those attributes are unique or engaging in some way. I usually start with subject matter (that’s pretty self explanatory), color, composition, perspective (that might not be the right word, but examples would be like a wide panorama or a tight crop of someones face or an aerial view of the ground), and a some others. Most importantly though are depth and purpose. Depth is the ability for you to get lost in a photo. Where all the prior attributes swirl together and draw you inside the image. These are the images that you just stare at, and you keep seeing something new the longer you look. I also feel a photograph can have a lot more power when it has a meaningful purpose behind it, but keep in mind that none of these are required. They’re just things that I try to change up with each photograph. Never have the same attribute twice in a row (of course not even I can follow these “rules” most of the time).

platformPHOTO: How do you articulate your ideas, from conception to creation and post-production? Tell us about your creative process.

Christian Hopkins: Most of my concepts start with an emotion, particularly one that I cannot explain or identify. I get extremely uncomfortable whenever I’m not in control, and it’s particularly unbearable when that loss of control is coming from something as personal as my own mind. When this happens, I usually sit down and try my best to put that emotion into words. For example, with my picture “Defense Mechanisms,”, my general words were: “I love photography, but I’ve reached a point where my personal expectations of my own work have exceeded my skill level. Now every time I try to take a photo, I get frustrated because I’m never satisfied with the result, but I can’t stop taking pictures because so many people are waiting to see what I’ll make next. It’s all so unbearable that I’d forever cut photography out of my life, remove something that is so close to my heart, just to stop feeling this.” And once the words are there the picture just kind of…appears.

platformPHOTO: How challenging is it to be working alone when creating often complex self-portraits?

Christian Hopkins: Yes…..very, very, yes. I use a remote shutter release, and up until recently, I had this dinky little infrared remote that had an effective range of 10 feet and you had to hit this sweet spot on the camera, so I would spend so much time staring numb at the camera while I futilely press this button and then suddenly the red light will go on and I have two seconds (and no this couldn’t be extended, I tried) to frantically pose, then wait, then *click.* I would have to run and check how the picture turned out after every shot because if I took a whole bunch of poses at once and I didn’t realize I was out of the frame, then all those pictures would be unusable. With some shoots taking hundreds of attempts because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, let’s just say I get a lot of exercise. Also, clamps are a solo self-portraitist’s best friend.

platformPHOTO: Can you give some information about the post-production process to create your images. Do you usually have a clear vision of what you wish to achieve during editing or is it something that happens while you are editing your images? Are there any particular techniques that you use?

Christian Hopkins: Most of the time the photograph is already finished in my before I even pick up the camera. I don’t usually even sketch anything out. I already know what it looks like. I’ve seen it. Taking the picture is just a formality. With my composites, I don’t really have a consistent technique because each one is so very different. What you might call a “technique” I would just call common sense. Start building the background, then cut out and add all the subjects, then match their hues and tones to the background, then overall touch ups, and finally start working with all the adjustment sliders to solidify the tone of the image.

platformPHOTO: Are there any photographers or artists working with other mediums that have been inspiration to you? Perhaps because of their style or the subject matter that they tackle within their work.

Christian Hopkins: Nope.

platformPHOTO: You started photography as a form of therapy in coping with depression, but now it seems as though this medium of expression has become a challenge in itself for you. Have you found that channelling your feelings through conceptual photographs has helped you in dealing with or understanding your depression?

Christian Hopkins: It’s the only tool I have in this fight. How do you fight an enemy you cannot touch, cannot see, and, most distressingly, is yourself? When I create a photograph, it is more than just an image. It’s the manifestation of some demon that has been haunting me to the point where I can no longer function. It’s then that I need to create this picture to take that demon out of my head and onto the screen in front of me. It’s strange, some weeks I’ll refuse to leave my bed because the smallest inclines become mountains, but suddenly it’s 4 in the morning and I’m running around a fog filled field camera in hand for hours trying to find the perfect place to compose this image that I already finished the moment I got out of bed. It’s the sense of control that leads me to create. It’s knowing that now I am the one now who is creating the image, I am the one who chooses what goes where, who does what, and why they do it. Being able to convey an emotion through something I create proves to me that I now understand this emotion enough to accurately communicate it to others.

platformPHOTO: Last week, you posted a blank image on your flickr account saying goodbye to your followers and that you have decided to give up photography, stating: “I can’t do this anymore….I’m at the point where my expectations have exceeded my capabilities…” Do you still feel this way and would you be able to elaborate on what brought you to this conclusion? Is there any chance that you may return to your personal photography in the future?

Christian Hopkins: Imagine a crowd of over 4 million people, and the spotlight’s on you. There they stand, far beyond the limits of your vision in an infinite black void, all waiting for you to say something, but of course you have nothing to say. Yet they do not budge, and the stillness starts to crush you. Every new moment in the growing silence pushes every word down your throat, and that silence grows stronger because of it, creating an eternal loop of suffocation. And you cannot run, you cannot escape into your mind, because this is your mind. The crowd is there when you sleep, when you eat. It’s under your skin and in your blood, and it drives you mad. That’s what it felt like, no matter how untrue or irrational it seems, that’s what it felt like. Sometimes it would get to the point where I would just hold onto my camera and rock back and forth for hours. That is why I had to stop, but I’m still here, and I’m not done. I’ve found new ways to communicate these emotions through images, and they’re silently screaming to get out.

platformPHOTO: Thank you so much for your time today Christian, we have one last question for you. If we sent you to a desert island and allowed you to take only one picture with you by another photographer, what would this image be?

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spacecollaborative-blog · 8 years ago

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Final Project: Before Editing

Introduction to Doctor Jane Healy’s Essay on the Ian McFielding Logs.

The daily logs of Doctor Ian McFielding-Simmons were found among the rubble of the Astra 27b three days after it plummeted to earth in fifth day of 2062 after a failure in the electrical wiring. These logs, since then, have been heralded the most convincing piece of evidence supporting the movement to end solo space travel since the first Astra took flight in 2037. The logs support the argument that ships as technologically complex as the Astra model can not be manned alone, and that machine failure cannot be overcome alone. But I believe the logs provide substantially darker evidence as to why solo space travel should be abolished for good.

Log 1.

23rd May 2067, Post-Mortem

Log 61.

There were no malfunctions in the Astra today.

20th April 2067, The Telegraph

A night of speculation and panic has reached a devastating end this morning as the bright lights that streaked the sky in the early hours of the morning are revealed by NASA to be the Astra 27 plummeting back home. After a severe malfunction in the wiring, it appears that British astronaut Doctor Ian McKinnon tried to return the rocket to the plains of Colorado, USA, in order to save the £25 million machine and his own life. Yet, terribly, to no avail. Though the atmospheric shields remained secure through both the Thermosphere and Mesophere, saving the Astra from combustion, it shut down entirely just a cruel 55km from the Earth’s surface. In a plead posted on the NASA website as dawn broke, we are asked to take a minutes silence at midday to honour the deceased Doctor Ian McKinnon.

Log 76.

Log 80.

You left me a booklet that I consult every single day. It tells me about the importance of routine in maintaining your sanity. So I read it every morning as soon as I wake up. It stresses the importance of remembering your past self, your self on earth. Little tics, little habits you have to maintain. As well as new routines to integrate into your new life. So after checking the booklet, and my pocket-watch, I go to the motherboard.

2nd June 2034, NASA interview posted to their website

‘It will completely change our idea of space,’ says Hudson, ‘No longer will it be an unattainable image, but a reachable destination that any person can visit.’

Log 95.

As for space, it remains the same. When I stare out the window I can see the same stars, and they all look the same. Until tomorrow.

Log 129.

Log 135.

I have spent the day investigating the blue fairies.

“Hello?” Ian said, when he heard the voice. “Who’s there?”

Last Log.

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