Sunday, June 20, 2010

D&G THEORY & FREUD'S WOLF MAN

If you’ve come to this post looking for something pastoral and uplifting, you probably won’t find it today. I’m cutting trail for a Deleuzeguattarian article to submit to a scholarly journal, using Cinematheque as the subject. It’s at the outer limits of what I understand myself so I might not be getting it right.

The justification for using an exotic Italian philosophical analysis to investigate a small, essentially domestic group such as Cinematheque is finally a matter of social critique. The persisting stigma of homosexuality has combined with the sexual victimization of children now infected with HIV-AIDS and traumatized by emotional suffering and drug use. Opposed to that are Tim Barrus’ developing ideas about tribes and art as a force for both recovery and economic participation. Art here is defined in the broadest sense, esp. focused on making video. This is a grassroots, ground level, entirely independent group, though connected to an international matrix of helpers.

At Cinematheque everything is on the move: the group as individuals and as a whole is nomadic though there is a central loft in Paris. Tim’s theories and techniques move developmentally since no one has done this before and no one really knows what will work until it is tried. Anyway, what works with one boy with one background might not work with another boy, and all the time the boys are growing up while Tim is growing older. Watching since 2007 and archiving daily messages, I have seen and can document the changes. My role is watching and occasionally providing material for the steady stream of blogged material. I reflect.

This particular reflection is centered on the chapter called, “1914: One or Several Wolves” in the book called “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, translated by Brian Massumi. It’s useful to find out who Massumi is: “a Canadian political philosopher and social theorist, his work focuses on perception, affect and the virtual.”

“Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal, and [they] are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation.”

“Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department and in the Media and Communications division at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Yale University in 1987. He is currently a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Montréal in Quebec Canada, where he directs both the Ph.D program and the Workshop in Radical Empiricism. His research is two-fold: the experience of movement and the interrelations between the senses, in particular in the context of new media art and technology; and emergent modes of power associated with the globalization of capitalism and the rise of preemptive politics.”
Sounds promising.

I take preemptive politics to have to do with restructuring society. Radical empiricism dates back to William James who valued first-hand experience and THEN theory. Massumi does not turn away from “intensity, psychoanalytic meaning, or experiment in society.” (All this material is a composite of Internet sources.) It tells me a lot that his website “wallpaper” is the fractal paisley of oil slicks.

This D&G chapter is about “The Wolf Man.” In 1914 Freud was treating a man he gave the code name “Wolf Man,” because one of his key dreams was waking as a child and fancying that a tree outside his bedroom window had white wolves perched in it. Freud, of course, worked out the meaning as being that the Wolf Man had witnessed his parents having sex and now feared castration, symbolized by the tails being cut off the wolves. The actual Wolf Man, who became known by others since he continued his psychoanalysis throughout his life (he lived to 92) though Freud declared him “cured” and dismissed him after a few years, protested that this interpretation was not just unlikely but impossible. He thought Freud was a fraud. It appears that the patient was grappling with family depression (several close family members committed suicide), childhood sexual abuse, severe constipation, and possibly homosexuality. Late in life he fancied that a doctor had drilled a hole in his nose. (It’s hard not to think of Michael Jackson!)

Another -- non-Freudian -- version is “that the case of Sergei Pankejeff, commonly known as Wolf Man, is an example of an unsuccessful religious sublimation. Freud focuses on the efforts by Sergei’s mother and his nurse to educate him in the Christian faith. He points out that, although these efforts were successful in making him into a piously religious boy, they contributed to the repression of his sexual attraction to his father, the arrest of his psychosexual development, and to an obsessional neurosis reflected in blasphemous thoughts and compulsive acts of religious piety.” Diagnosis often tells one more about the diagnoser than about the patient.

Whole books exist about the wolf man. This is from Amazon: “Whitney Davis’ "Drawing the Dream of the Wolves" offers a new and challenging reading of Freud's case study of Serge Pankejeff, the Wolf Man, on whom Freud conducted a complex psychoanalysis from 1910 to 1914. Much of the analysis revolved around the patient's childhood dream of wolves and a drawing of this dream made for Freud by Pankejeff and amateur artists in the first weeks of the analysis. Davis explores the role of the drawing of the dream in Freud's interpretation of the patient's latent homosexuality, showing that Freud based his decipherment of the drawing and, in turn, of the patient's sexual identity in part on his own established practices of making and using images to represent the history of persons and their sexuality. During the analysis, Freud interpreted the Wolf Man's childhood phobia and intense fear of wolves and his adult neuroses as having been the result of the little boy's latent homosexuality.” It’s all very pretentious and perverse.

Deleuzeguattari investigate this case from an entirely different angle, much closer to the actual nature of wolves and the functions of perception. At the highly theoretical level, D&G speak of the molecular multiplicities (seeing lots of little versions of a concept everywhere) and the molar unities (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). Freud found it significant but misleading that there are five or six wolves in the tree and began to whittle them away with theories until the tail of the last one is cut off, which he claims signifies castration. The D&G philosopher’s daughter points out that wolves come in PACKS and what’s in the tree is not a wolf, but a PACK! Sometimes theory must yield to the obvious.

Likewise, Cinematheque is often discussed in terms of one boy at a time, but it is in fact a collection of boys, changing as some leave and others arrive. The constant is Tim Barrus, but he is a variable constant even as his hips and shoulders are replaced due to avascular necrosis and as he learns from successes and failures, who are often real fatalities.

Cinematheque is not a franchise. There is no pretense to academic advances. (Intellectualizing is mostly mine but possibly also connected to Jack Fritscher, a powerful thinker in the context of homomasculinity.) The idea is simply to save these specific boys by teaching them to support and love each other. Sometimes a little “talking cure” helps sort things out. Cinematheque is privately financed through a foundation and occasionally connected to related organizations like Doctors without Borders. There is no hierarchy. The boys, when unified, can overrule Tim. They also protect and nurture him. I understand this to be an example of what D&G call “rhizomatous” organization as compared to “arboreal” hierarchies.

Massumi’s translation suggests, “One of the essential characteristics of the dream of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance of multiplicity in relation to the others.” In this case the boys would be the elements. This new way of thinking is schizophrenic in the sense of shattering, dividing. “The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do with generation [Freud’s obsession with sex] but rather peopling population. It is an affair of worldwide population on the full body of the earth, not organic familial generation.” We “only have a desert with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.” Not child-descendants but friends and co-workers.

I have to go away and think about this now.

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