Bodies, Affects, Politics. Steve Pile
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Название: Bodies, Affects, Politics

Автор: Steve Pile

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: География

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isbn: 9781118901946

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СКАЧАТЬ or Voltaire’s Oedipus, for these operate within the dominant representational regime of aesthetics, where characters and situations are taken literally. For both of them, it was simply impossible for audiences to suspend their disbelief when Oedipus cannot believe what Tiresias tells him. They believed their audiences simply would not understand that Oedipus was ‘in denial’ (as it is now popularly termed). Interestingly, this was apparently not the case for restoration period English audiences, as Dryden and Lee’s version followed Sophocles’ plot closely. Either way, for Rancière, neither incest nor Oedipus’ ability to hear or see the truth is at the heart of Freud’s choice. Rather, Freud chooses Sophocles’ Oedipus because the classical aesthetic regime (as Rancière calls it) places defects in the subject at the heart of tragedy. This sense of flaws in people’s characters provides Freud, in this view, with the ability to imagine unconscious processes, such as denial and castration anxiety.

      And, for me, too. Rather than Oedipus being a lesson in what happens if you break the incest taboo (knowingly or not), this is about the relationship between knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, hearing and not hearing (see Chapters 2 and 3): that is, the relationship between conscious and unconscious thought processes (see Chapters 3 and 4). And, as we see (in Chapters 5 and 6), between a repressive unconscious and a communicative unconscious. In particular, the (classical or representational) aesthetic regime is connected to the ideas of overdetermination and indeterminacy, where overdetermination is about how meaning is determined many times over through the distribution of the senses (that creates ways of knowing, seeing, hearing, feeling and so on) and where indeterminacy is a product of the epistemic cut between knowing and not knowing, seeing and not seeing, hearing and not hearing, feeling and not feeling and so on. My approach to these issues is empirical. The relationship between bodies, affects and politics is not to be decided in the abstract or in advance, but in context.

      Rancière also asks why Freud draws upon Oedipus at all. That is, why does Freud draw upon a fictitious character from a stage play to model psychic structures? This question can be usefully extended: why does Freud draw on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (immediately following his discussion of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams) or other artistic products, such as Michelangelo’s statue of Moses (Freud 1913), Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Freud 1899), ‘The Sandman’ horror story by E.T.A. Hoffman (Freud 1919, which also establishes a connection between eyes and the fear of castration), and the like? For me, these examples perform two significant functions. First, these examples, for Freud, bear witness to unconscious processes through the aesthetic forms they take. Second, they reveal that unconscious processes bleed through life, in all its forms: that is, given the focus of this book, through bodies, through affects and through politics. Thus, as this book is to bear witness to the ‘aesthetic unconscious’ of bodies, affects and politics, I draw on a range of examples: I have selected Freud’s case studies (Chapters 4, 5 and 6), autobiography (Chapters 2 and 3), novels (Chapter 2), Hollywood movies (Chapter 5) and art (Chapter 7). Importantly, for my argument, the unconscious is not confined to a particular space, such as the consulting room, and especially not to the brain or the mind of the individual.

      The coexistence of bodily regimes can imply that they are somehow discrete, such that there cannot be movement through or across bodily regimes; more than this, that bodily regimes are somehow confined to bodies themselves – and not ‘of the world’. Chapters, 4 and 5 explore the topologies and topographies of psychic space. In these chapters, we learn about the slippages between bodily regimes, as the world touches upon the psyche and as the psyche touches upon the world. Significantly, this involves the shifts and whorls of affects through the body and the social. To understand this, these chapters draw heavily on the idea of the Möbius strip. The strip is mostly understood as a way to describe the inversion of inside and outside (and is aligned therefore with the torus and the Klein bottle). However, key to these chapters is the movement along the strip that creates the inversion. It is movement that creates the tension between overdetermination and indeterminacy (at each point). Significantly, the strip also necessarily has width, which requires factoring in lateral movement – as an additional dimension of indeterminacy.