X. JOUR MAL II: CRASH AESTHETICS, PART II OF IV.
For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season I, Episode II, Part I: “CRASH AESTHETICS”.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In Association with PHASMID PRESS
THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS:
JOUR MAL: SERIES I-TRASH
Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B
Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson
Outro music: Stolen Face (1952) OST by Malcom Arnold
Graphic design: Scott McCLure
Special thanks to Rob Scher
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EPISODE TWO (IN FOUR PARTS): CRASH AESTHETICS
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EPISODE TWO, PART II
II. The Power and the State: A Sketch of Common Interpretations of Fascination
Non-psychoanalytical definitions of fascination typically refer to the same melange of concepts. Steven Connor (1998) describes the phenomena as a derivation of the Latin fascinare, “meaning to bewitch or enchant and, until the nineteenth century and even beyond, the word retained this strong association with the idea of the maleficent exercise of occult or supernatural force” (Connor 9). Similarly, Brigette Weingart states that the Greco-Roman etymology of fascination both explicitly and implicitly “locates the notion within the history of magic (or, depending upon your perspective, superstition)” (Weingart 74).
Historically, the power of fascination, its transmission and suffering, has characteristically been assumed to be the province of sight/looking, predicated on the Medusa-cum-Perseus archetype in Greco-Roman mythology. According to Tobin Siebers (1983), the head of Medusa fascinates because “its horrifying countenance spontaneously transforms its beholder to stone [and] yet the mask of Medusa also serves an apotropaic function, as do all masks, by protecting its wearer against fascination. The mask of Medusa once more presents a familiar paradox: the Gorgoneion both causes and cures the evil eye. Yet Perseus also carries and cures the disease of fascination” (Siebers 58).
Louis Marin (1977) also notes this central paradox, between elevation and degeneration at the heart of fascination, at the heart of the symbol of Medusa's head: “we [always-already] have, then, two Medusas in one: a horrible monster as well as a striking beauty: the fascination of contraries mixed together” (Marin 140). Jean-Pierre Vernant (1985) further explicates the notion of fascination as a type of infection and/or psychologically viral power that entraps and ensnares, whose functioning also latently involves reciprocity, mutuality, and transference: “fascination means that man can no longer detach his gaze and turn his face away from this Power; it means that his eye is lost in the eye of this Power, which looks at him as he looks at it [as Nietzsche said of his abyss], and that he himself is thrust into the world over which this Power presides” (Vernant 221).
Hmmm. Well, perhaps, it is in the eyes of Medusa, as it is in the panting of a paraphiliac, or in the sewer, is an entire universe, into which to elevate and expand, into which to dissolve and be consumed, a Sisyphysian task from which to escape. Maybe what Cronenberg shines a blacklight on is all really simple. As Camus states, “great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as “definite,” as remote and as “present” as those furnished us by beaut y or aroused by absurdity” (Camus 8). What does it really matter, then, how absurd a paraphilia may sound to you if “living is keeping the absurd alive”? (Camus 8).
Maybe to most its not absurdity at all, but rather horror, as Bataille asserts: “In order to reach the limits of the ecstasy in which we lose ourselves in bliss we must always set an immediate boundary to it: horror. Not only can pain, my own or that of other people, carry me nearer to the moment when horror will seize hold of me and bring me to a state of bliss bordering on delirium, but there is no kind of repugnance whose affinity with desire I do not discern. Horror is sometimes confused with fascination, but if it cannot suppress and destroy the element of fascination it will reinforce it. Danger has a paralysing effect, but if it is a mild danger it can excite desire. We can only reach a state of ecstasy when conscious of death or annihilation, even if remotely.” (Bataille 267) Well, maybe its all better unthought of, then, “just as though our whole humanity did not spring from the reaction of horror followed by fascination linked with sensitiveness and intelligence” (Bataille 266). And yet sill – “if I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to me to wonder if this is vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable” (Camus 40).
Either way, it seems to me that the understanding of fascination, as a force of extramission and intramission through an invisible albeit omnipresent substance or effluvium, saw a revival in the nineteenth century's preoccupation with the occult, spiritualism, hypnosis and mesmerism. Retrospectively, it may seem somewhat silly, certainly crude, this animal magnetism that Mesmer spoke of. Mesmer's treatise on Animal Magnetism printed in Geneva in 1779, contains the entirety of, well perhaps the unsurprisingly, and indeed fittingly fascinating history of the entire concept. By and large, the adjective “mesmeric” the substantive “mesmerism”, as well as the verb to “mesmerize” have scarce altered their meanings since they first became current. Some see all of this as “posterity's unique tribute to a unique man”. And who was this man, indeed? One Franz Anton Mesmer, born in the modest Austrian village of Iznang, Lake Constance, on May 23rd, 1734. Maybe fair to refer to him as a sort of economy Freud, a Jung with a penchant for garden soirees and the ear and pursestrings of the gentry, Mesmer's significance in Western medical history is debatable. His supporters, scant and recessed as they may be, would hold fast to the assertion that his was a dangerous path, dabbling about with brains, their control, their elevation or submission. These same arcane acolytes would most likely point you to the fact that the last European – and they'll most likely use this term, which sounds stolidly scientific, terrifically taxonomic – neuropath to be killed for witchcraft was burned at the stake in Leith, Scotland (I used to live there, incidentally, right at the heel of the Walk), only an even dozen years preceding his birth. Others, like the Abbe Fiard a century later, made the connection between Mesmer and the Mephistophelean abundantly clear, putting Mesmer and Cagliostro in the same Satanist breakout room.
Having just turned my age, thirty-two, on May 27th 1766, Franz reached into his cosmology, but more like astronomy bag, withdrew his paper Disputatio de Planetarum Influxu (“Concerning the influence of the planets”), and read it aloud for the citizenry. He was awarded a faculty diploma for his efforts, and later refers to the document in question as the Mimoire or “The Dissertation”. I don't know if the me I was, wine-soaked and avoidant, which is a dishonest way of me saying depressed, when in the throws of final drafts and later corrections, is jealous and dreams of standing on a crate used to cart oranges set up in front of the David Hume Tower, yelling in mid-winter about Sunstones, Jewel Mountains, and Fire Falls. Anyway, he returned to “The Dissertation” only to tweak the title, as far as I know, adding “in corpus humanum” (“on the human body”). The rest, unchanged in the mein, formed the basis of his famous Twenty-Seven Propositions concerning the beautiful, mysterious, and powerful-sounding phenomena he referred to as “animal magnetism”
I don't have the time and wealth of your indulgence to enumerate these postulates in their entirety. To say something, however, of tenor, tone, and reception, well, we need only look to the introduction of Mesmerism by Mesmer, written by Gilbert Frankau for the 1779 edition. Concerning the good doctor's Propositions, Frankau would have us believe that “these Propositions, however fallacious, foreshadowed some of our present-day knowledge about the afferent and efferent elements in the nervous system seems to [him] a possibility. Indubitable, however, is the fact that they led up, through " somnambulism ", as it was originally called, to hypnotism, a word coined by the Scottish doctor James Braid in the eighteen-forties” (Frankau 9). Frankau goes on [quote]: “This fact, I claim, entitles Mesmer to be regarded as the father of modern psychotherapy” (Frankau 9).
This is to say nothing of the modern augurers, skaldars, vulva, baloyi, casters, crafters, cursers, and curers who Frankau believes owe Franz a debt of influence, specifically with regard to the methods and maneuvers of mediums. Pursuing this line, I'd add psycho-sexually inclined thinkers and practitioners, whatever stripe, form, credo, or character, to this admixture.
Now, whether you sacrifice yourself to the experience limite like Foucault, or like Mrs Eddy, enrol a guard of virgins to protect you from the malign influence of animal magnetism, or be like Quinby, a dedicated student to it, I reckon its more interesting to consider the people Franz knew. Casually, and with a detectable dose of nascent pride, Frankau notes that “admittedly the young Mozart was under an obligation to Mesmer—a staunch friend of his father Leopold, an acquaintance of Gliick and Haydn, even personal correspondent of Benjamin Franklin” (Frankau 18).
With these connections, what did ol' Franz get up to? Well, there was the lavishly decorated clinic, to begin with. Perhaps it was the furniture, the gorgeous curtains, or fine carpets that made for the absolutely perfect backdrop from those early experimental treatments that saw him put forward models of group therapy and mass hypnotism. Frankau says he was “armed with a wand” which he used to oversee and officiate, wearing “anti-magnetic” clothing, while refrains of music played, the minor mass thronged around a baquet – “a large vat filled with water and magnetic material such as iron filings” (Frankau 15). It gets weirder, for from this magna-vat, “projected metal bars, which the patients, who also held one another's hands as at table-turning seances, grasped during treatment” (Frankau 15). Based on accounts of patients like Margaret Goldsmith, it sounds like something between the respective practices of Dr. Moreau and Dr. Parnassus: “the baquet [...] had been used by Mesmer, along with 'magnetized' trees, ponds, etc since 1775” with most people not in the mesmeric field of mystery chalking up the bulky apparatuses and the strange attire and activities within them as some kind of battery, a source of electrical energy. The following year in 1776, Mesmer abandons the use of magnets and electricity in his burgeoning psycho-therapeutic praxis, hereby effecting an auto-anotonymic apostasy against Proposition Seventeen of his own Dissertation's dicta which, describing this baquet as a type of storage tank, decreed: “This magnetic property may be stored up, concentrated and transported” (Frankau 15). Ask yourself as we go along: What is the magnetism Mesmer describes, really? The draw and pull of closer tides? Its province, puissance, provenance, principality, power, pallid or pouting that pushes on the pressure of the pump, upward into a a gummy smile, that pulls on the pulp in your teeth, the mouth in your mind to gasp, like waking up to the dim azure wash, winter air, through decanter-cut facets of a blue sun.
We could add Caligari to the mix, in view of Franz's extensive use of mirrors, to accompany his music, which, in Proposition Fifteen, he described as “intensifying and reflecting” animal magnetism “just like light” (Frankau 16), and later in Proposition Sixteen how animal magnetism “is communicated, propagated and intensified by sound” (Frankau 16).
The strangeness followed him to his near homophonic end. Mesmer died at Meersburg, on the north shore of that lake he'd swam in as a youth. We know from his youthful friend Justinus Kerner, who wrote in a book published in Maine in 1856, that Mesmer died smiling. Frankau calls this “a strange thing” but stranger still “is the tale of the magnetisable canary which would fly from its cage, always open, and perch on his head to sing him awake every morning; perch on the sugar basin while he ate his breakfast and anticipate his need by pecking extra lumps into his coffee cup. For the end of that tale, as Kerner relates it: " Next morning Mesmer lay as though he were still alive, but never again did the canarybird fly on to his head to wake him. It ate no more and sang no more and soon it was found dead in its cage” (Frankau 21). The man, the magnetism, the mesmeric crisis and the therapeutic value of them all scarce countenanced, in their time and in times that came after, the value of the mesmeric 'trance'. Well, maybe not to nobody. Perhaps even only to a character named Lavater, whose “conversion to animal magnetism was largely due to experiments of a hypnotic nature carried out on his own wife” (Frankau 22).
By the 1800s this mesmeric crisis was a strange, perhaps even fascinating footnote in the annuls of the century, overshadowed by the light of unnumbered luminaries, polymaths many of which whom he himself knew and struck up with. What was left of the magnetism and the mesmerism was something described, perhaps, as “a form of sleep-walking”, whereas “the trance retained its name Somnambulism until the publication of Braid's Neurhypnology or the "Rationale of Nervous Sleep considered in relation with Animal Magnetism re-christened it Hypnotism shortly after 1843” (Gregory 2). Another character, this Baird, who Gregory, writing in his 1877 Mesmerism and its Phenomena, said “suffered from various delusions, notably that he could bring about both psychological and physiological changes in a tranced patient by stroking certain parts of the skull. (This process was called phreno-magnetism.) But with his discovery that " hypnosis " could be induced by the simplest means of fixing the patient's attention it became obvious, even to the most academically minded medico, that, whatever its cause, the mesmeric trance could not be humbug. The hypnotic condition was too well established a fact” (Gregory 3).
This is why, comparative eons later, characters like Connor note that “the power of the mesmerist to fascinate or entrance his subjects was most commonly explained as the effect of magnetic or electrical forces originating in the body of the mesmeriser and passing across to his subjects” (Connor 11). Here already is the latent suggestion that the action(s) of the power of fascination, while seeming mono-directional, are in fact governed by an exchange between reciprocally fascinated subject entities. A giving over and a taking up, not unlike Goethe's Faust in the “Martha's Garden” scene who declares: ... to give oneself completely and to feel an ecstasy which must be everlasting! Everlasting—for the end would be despair. No—no end! no end!
