Psychosomatic Imagery: Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders 303122714X, 9783031227141

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Photography and Mental Disorders: Then and Now
Psychosomatic Imagery
Structure of the Book
References
Part I: Secluded Subjects and Sociable Objects
Chapter 2: The Room Is the World: Reflecting on the Lived Life of Hikikomori Through Photography
Hikikomori: A Radical Social Withdrawal
The Lived Place of Hikikomori
The Lived Time of Hikikomori
References
Chapter 3: Objects as Friends: Depression and Photography in the Work of Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys
Depression in de Gruyter and Thys’ Videos
Photography and Still Life in de Gruyter and Thys’ Photographic Work
References
Part II: Psychosomatic Disruptions and Distortions
Chapter 4: Traces of Absence: the (Im)Possibility of Representing the Phantom Limb
Representing the Invisible
After Image
Ambiguous Traces
Traces of Existence
Traces of Memory
References
Chapter 5: “Let Me Die, or I’ll Perish”: Dissolution and Resurrection Through the Photographic Double
Staging the Photographic Double
Acknowledging the Symptomatic Gaze
References
Chapter 6: Ghost Feelings and Distortion: Redefining Dis-Order
Rhythms and Relations
The Frame, the Photograph, and the Trap
Disarticulation, Dis-order, and the Integrated Reject
References
Part III: Traversing Hysteria and Bipolar Disorder
Chapter 7: Somatic Signals: Nicole Jolicoeur’s Aura Hysterica
The Perverse Reconfigurations of Aura Hysterica
Somatic Language Against Projectile Representation
Photography and Hysteria
Aura Hysterica as a Détournement of Typology
Somatic Semiotics
References
Chapter 8: Buried Images, Ritual Selves: Looking at South Asian Mental Health in Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance
Perspectives on Bipolar Disorder
My Friend Has Changed: Image and In/Visibility
Adivasi Masks: Thresholds of Spatiality/Temporality
Coda
References
Part IV: Images Mediating Between Two Worlds
Chapter 9: Photographic Visions of Mentally Disordered Perceptual Experiences: Disruptions in Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s Psychosomatic Imagery
Photographic and Deviating Perceptions as Theoretical Framework
The Photograph as Reflection of Multiple Perceptual Experiences
The Photograph as a Veil Between Two Worlds
Disturbed Interaction Due to Disruptive Frames
References
Chapter 10: Selfies as “Control Pictures”: Mastering Fearful Psychosomatic Images Through the Photo Camera
Mastering the World Behind Our Backs
Recording of Corpses and the Metaphor of Death in Photography Theory
Necrophiliac Images and Dark Selfies
A Psychosomatic Fearful Image Turned into a Dark Selfie as Control Picture
References
Index

Citation preview

Psychosomatic Imagery Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders Edited by Ali Shobeiri · Helen Westgeest

Psychosomatic Imagery

Ali Shobeiri  •  Helen Westgeest Editors

Psychosomatic Imagery Photographic Reflections on Mental Disorders

Editors Ali Shobeiri Departments of Media Studies and Art History Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

Helen Westgeest Departments of Media Studies and Art History Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-031-22714-1    ISBN 978-3-031-22715-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The editors wish to thank all the rights holders for permitting us to reproduce the copyrighted material in the book. We also would like to thank our academic institution Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University, for supporting us during the research and publication process. Next, we want to thank Lina Aboujieb, the series editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for warmly embracing the proposal of this book. Just before finalizing the book, Ton Brouwers kindly and diligently edited the entire manuscript, for which we are immensely thankful. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to our BA students of Art History, MA students of Arts and Culture, and MA students of Film and Photographic Studies at Leiden University; their insatiable desire for learning has always been a source of inspiration for us.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Ali Shobeiri Part I Secluded Subjects and Sociable Objects  15 2 The  Room Is the World: Reflecting on the Lived Life of Hikikomori Through Photography 17 Ali Shobeiri 3 Objects  as Friends: Depression and Photography in the Work of Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys 39 Stefaan Vervoort Part II Psychosomatic Disruptions and Distortions  59 4 Traces  of Absence: the (Im)Possibility of Representing the Phantom Limb 61 Laura Bertens 5 “Let  Me Die, or I’ll Perish”: Dissolution and Resurrection Through the Photographic Double 81 Samuel Dylan Ewing vii

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Contents

6 Ghost  Feelings and Distortion: Redefining Dis-Order 93 Karen D. van Minnen Part III Traversing Hysteria and Bipolar Disorder 111 7 Somatic  Signals: Nicole Jolicoeur’s Aura Hysterica113 Paul Grace 8 Buried  Images, Ritual Selves: Looking at South Asian Mental Health in Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance137 Eric Patel Part IV Images Mediating Between Two Worlds 157 9 Photographic  Visions of Mentally Disordered Perceptual Experiences: Disruptions in Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s Psychosomatic Imagery159 Helen Westgeest 10 Selfies  as “Control Pictures”: Mastering Fearful Psychosomatic Images Through the Photo Camera 183 Ana Peraica Index199

Notes on Contributors

Laura Bertens  is Assistant Professor of Art History at Leiden University, with a PhD in Biology. Her research interests pertain to the fields of memory studies, contemporary art, and cultural studies. In her analyses she highlights the construction and functioning of cultural and communicative memories in art, monuments, and everyday culture. She published book chapters and contributed articles to peer-reviewed journals such as Third Text, Holocaust Studies, and German Life and Letters on topics ranging from the Berlin Wall Memorial and Holocaust remembrance in art to music videos and the performative memory of cultural trails. Samuel  Dylan  Ewing  is an independent scholar and curator based in Philadelphia, PA, who crafts histories of art and photography that communicate the role visual culture plays in the creation of liberatory knowledge. His writing focuses on the intersection of documentary practices, radical politics, and pedagogy. Ewing is at work on a book manuscript focused on members of the San Diego Group: artists Fred Lonidier, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, and Phel Steinmetz. Paul Grace  is a UK-based academic who teaches Art History and Theory in the School of Art and Society, University Centre Blackburn in the north-west of England. His research concerns the strategies used to amplify the potency of images of social trauma and conflict. “The Destroyed Body in the Work of Thomas Hirschhorn” appears in the anthology War and Art: The Portrayal of Destruction and Mass Violence (2020), and The Dissolution of the Monuments in Toppling Things: Affect ix

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and Monument Removal (Brill Series Thamyris—Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race) is forthcoming in 2023. Eric Patel  is an artist born and raised in California. His non-disciplinary practice often touches on complicity and entanglement with violence, the senses, transience, potential modes of refusal, and being together. He studied Applied Mathematics (BS, University of California, Los Angeles) and Photography (MA, Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving St. Joost), and participated in residencies at Caradt/Belius Foundation, FLACC Werkplaats voor Beeldende Kunstenaars, and Het Vijfde Seizoen. He contributed works to exhibitions at the International Center of Photography School, Art Students League, Eye Filmmuseum, Marres Huis voor Hedendaagse Cultuur, and Nieuw Dakota, as well as to Sarmad magazine. Ana  Peraica  is a visiting professor at Danube University in Krems and was recently a visiting fellow at Central European University (CEU). She authored The Age of Total Images (2019; 2021), Fotografija kao dokaz (2017), and Culture of the Selfie (2017). Her articles were published in Leonardo Journal, Afterimage, Philosophy of Photography, Photographies, Lexia, and other academic journals, as well as in publications from Routledge, Sage, Wiley Blackwell, and MIT Press. As a reviewer, she is a regular contributor to Leonardo Journal Reviews. Ali Shobeiri  is Assistant Professor of Photography and Visual Culture at Leiden University. Since 2018, he has been teaching courses for MA of Film and Photographic Studies, BA of Art\Media\Society, and BA of International Studies. His research and publications are in the fields of aesthetics, photography theories, spatial studies, phenomenology, and visual culture. He is the author of Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography (2021) and co-editor of Animation and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). His upcoming book projects are called: Oikography and Virtual Photography. Karen D. van Minnen  graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and University of Amsterdam (research MA in Cultural Analysis). She has worked as a critical designer specialized in sociopolitical exhibit and experimental theater design. She was a lecturer with the Hogeschool van Amsterdam/Faculteit Digitale Media en Creatieve Industrie (Communication), introducing and implementing critical analysis and semiotics, and was responsible for the implementation of Creative Design with Hanze University of Applied Science.

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She owns an online educational practice and research project, called Solutions for [Small] Problems. At the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, she is working on a PhD project, titled Out of Touch: Idiorrhythmic Life in Technocratic Digital Landscapes. Stefaan  Vervoort is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University (UGent) and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Artesis Plantijn College University, Antwerp. His research focuses on the exchange between postwar art and architecture, and on postwar sculpture in relation to technology. He is co-editor of three monographs and regularly has his work published in art and architecture journals, as well as in edited volumes and catalogs. He is part of KB45/Art in Belgium—since 1945, a UGent research group investigating postwar art in Belgium using new perspectives. He is reworking his PhD into a book on the Düsseldorf academy and art scene (1975–1985). Helen  Westgeest  is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Leiden University. Her research focuses on comparative studies of media in contemporary visual art, in particular the role of intermediality in the meaning production of artworks. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as in several monographs and edited volumes. Her book publications include: Slow Painting: Contemplation and Critique in the Digital Age (2020), Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach (2016), and Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (co-authored with Hilde Van Gelder, 2011, Chinese translation 2013).

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Atle Blekastad. Goodbye Without Leaving. 2021. Courtesy of the artist 19 Atle Blekastad. Mind Map. 2021. Courtesy of the artist 25 Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Objects as Friends 299, color print mounted on mdf, 48 × 60 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artists41 Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Objects as Friends 108, color print mounted on mdf, 48 × 60 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artists 42 Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Het Spinnewiel, video, color, sound, 34 minutes, 2002. Courtesy of the artists 44 Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Travaux Photographiques, black-and-­white photograph, aluminum frame, 80 × 60 cm, 2006. Courtesy of the artists 49 Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Untitled (Skeletons), black-and-white print mounted on pdf, 84 × 119 cm, 2009. Courtesy of the artists 51 Exhibition view of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys—Objecten als Vrienden, Mu.ZEE Oostende, 2012. Copyright Mu.ZEE Oostende, photo: Steven Decroos 56 Diagram incorporating dotted outlines depicting triple phantom limbs induced by hypnosis in a patient who had undergone three amputations of the left lower limb. Reproduced from Schott (2014) 67 Three of the eight sets of photographs from Alexa Wright’s series After Image (1997), showing the complete photographic series of RD, JN, and JoN. All photographs and xiii

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

excerpts of the interviews can be found on the artist website (Wright 2020). Photographs courtesy of the artist David Nebreda, La découverte du veritable sense du miroir. Il ne sait plus où il est et où est l’autre, 1989–1990. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000 David Nebreda, Conversation sacrée, 1987–1988. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000 David Nebreda, Les deux fils nés et les deux à naître, 1987–1988. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000 Anonymous photographer, Cavallier (side view). (France, 1918. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007676079/) Barbara Ess, Untitled (2000) (Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York) Paul Regnard, Hystéro-Épilepsie État Normal, from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M. Charcot), 1878, photogravure. (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program) Nicole Jolicoeur, SENSATION DE BOULE page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux Nicole Jolicoeur, untitled (Augustine) page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux Nicole Jolicoeur, CALIN page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux Nicole Jolicoeur, AUGUSTINE page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux Gauri Gill, Untitled (9), from photo series Acts of Appearance, 2015–ongoing. Archival pigment print (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Copyright Gauri Gill. Image Courtesy of Gauri Gill and James Cohan, New York Gauri Gill, Untitled (76), from photo series Acts of Appearance, 2015–ongoing. Archival pigment print (40.6 x 61 cm). Copyright Gauri Gill. Image Courtesy of Gauri Gill and James Cohan, New York (a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist Lauren E. Simonutti, Cornered, 2011. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago

68 83 89 90 97 105

116 118 126 130 132

144

149 163 164

  List of Figures 

Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2

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(a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist 168 Lauren E. Simonutti, Invisible, 2007. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago 169 (a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist 174 Lauren E. Simonutti, Tomorrow is my birthday and I have tired of this room, 2010. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago 175 Selfie with dead body (viral image) 191 Victorian postmortem family portrait of parents with their deceased daughter (the work in the public domain, source: Wikimedia)192

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Ali Shobeiri

In March 2020, due to the exponential increase in the number of coronavirus cases outside China, the director of World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the outbreak could be characterized as a pandemic. Having now taken the lives of approximately 5.8 million people just two years after that announcement, the COVID-19 pandemic is still causing physical and mental suffering across the globe. If the ongoing pandemic has exposed one thing over the past two years, it is our vulnerability to pain; not only to physical pain but also to psychological pain. It has exposed the fact that all humans, regardless of their sex, race, class, or their social, political, and economic status, are susceptible to conditions like anxiety and depression. As established by recent cross-disciplinary research, since the beginning of the pandemic the number of people suffering from depression and anxiety has been continually on the rise across different continents (Rudenstine et  al. 2020; Twenge and Joiner 2020; Özdin and Özdin 2020; Palgi et al. 2020; Alyami et al. 2020; Choi et al. 2020; Dozois 2021). Although the increasing pervasiveness of depression and anxiety is a present-day phenomenon, mental disorders are nothing

A. Shobeiri (*) Departments of Media Studies and Art History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_1

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new. They were described and treated in ancient Mesopotamia as early as 3000 BC (Nejat and Rhea 1998). Being oblivious to their causes and roots, Mesopotamians would consider mental disorders as “hands” of specific deities taking control over a person, thus deeming them as metaphysical interventions in one’s mind. While one particular condition was known as “hand of Ishtar,” another one was known as “hand of Shamash” (Black and Green 1992, 102). In our time, according to the WHO, in most countries one in three people report sufficient criteria that can be linked to at least one mental disorder at some point in their life, a number which signals the ubiquitous presence of such conditions across the globe (2000). Still, what do we actually mean when we use the term “mental disorder”? What are the substrata of calling a mood-swing anxiety or a general air of malaise “depression”? Does a person with anxiety or depression have a dis-ordered mind? If that is the case, what are the underlying criteria, conditions, and, above all, the ethical implications of calling one mind orderly and the other disorderly? Even though the exact number of defined mental disorders continually goes up, their main categories include, but are not limited to: anxiety disorder, mood disorder, psychotic disorder, personality disorder, eating disorder, sleep disorder, and cognitive disorder. Aspiring to make a cogent account, the latest version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) explains: “A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning” (APA 2013, 20). Although widely used among psychologists and psychotherapists, in such a definition the concept of “dysfunction” takes precedence over other explanations. Considering a mental disorder to be a dysfunction may raise a bifurcated issue, that is: understanding mental disorders as biological or psychological impairments. First, calling a mental disorder a biological dysfunction suggests that it carries perceptible symptoms discriminated by neuroimaging tests, thus reducing a mental disorder to a physically manifestable condition (Telles-Correia 2018, 3). Second, referring to a mental disorder as a psychological dysfunction affixes values to a so-called “normal” or “functional” mind (4), thus disregarding that the very concept of value is time-dependent and placebound. For example, once it was a sign of antisocial personality disorder to be homebound for long, but during the COVID-19 pandemic this same

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practice came to denote social responsibility and compassionate care. This means that a functional comportment can be seen as a dysfunctional one, or vice versa, contingent upon the cultural codes, societal rules, or political contracts prevalent at a given time or in a given place. Eschewing from using the term “dysfunction” in defining mental disorders, philosopher George Graham reminds us of the co-existence of “stability” and “instability” in the way our mind operates. In The Disordered Mind, a recent, compendious philosophical study of cases, consequences, and treatments of mental disorders, Graham unpretentiously notes: “True, some folks are more temperamentally secure than others. True, some people are much less able to undergo various trials and tribulations than others. But beneath our individual differences, however, is a fusion of both. Each of us is endowed with stable/unstable mind” (2021, 3). In this light, a mental disorder transpires when the unstable mind governs the stable one, when the disorderly self dominates the orderly one, incapacitating the thoughts and actions of a person in unintended and harmful ways, to the extent that the person requires treatment and assistance from others (60). Such a destigmatizing definition does not perceive a mental disorder as a biological or psychological dysfunction, as DSM-5 does. Instead, it deems it as the disruption of the nexus between the stable and the unstable mind, which if not treated, may result in nocuous actions and behaviors. Every person’s mind, Graham writes, “is a mix of the orderly and disorderly, the stable and unstable. When this mix goes awry, mental disorder may be the cause” (11). For this book, too, a mental disorder is not to be seen as a dysfunction, impairment, or abnormality, but a state in which the sustaining equipoise of stable and unstable mind is unsettled, which may last from hours to days, or from months to years. The study of mental disorders, however, is not only limited to psychology and philosophy, but has also been open to a variety of other disciplines, such as visual arts, literature, and pop culture. Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922|1972) by Hans Prinzhorn was one of the first attempts to study the drawings of schizophrenic patients, not only psychologically but also aesthetically, establishing what is now called the field of “psychiatric art.” Covering the Middle Ages through the end of the nineteenth century, Sander L. Gilman explored the depictions of mental disorders in Seeing the Insane (1982), showing how manuscripts, sculptures, and lithographs had shaped the societal image of the mentally ill and thus marginalized them into the state of otherness. Mustering evidence from mythology and anthropology, C.R. Badcock’s Madness and Modernity (1983) looked

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into possible underlying causes of mental ailments through studying the evolution of culture and technological shifts of modernity. In a similarly titled study, Madness and Modernism (1992), Louis Sass attempted to redefine schizophrenia by examining the works of writers such as Nietzsche and Kafka. In Creativity and Disease (1992), Philip Sandblom explored the influence and effects of mental illness on creativity through surveying the lives and works of 140 artists. Aspiring to rectify the sensationalized, yet marginalized, image of the people with mental issues in video games, comics, graphic novels, and music lyrics, Mental Illness in Popular Culture (Parker 2017) questioned the accuracy and influence of various media representations of mental disorders. In Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature (2019), Kia Jane Richmond highlighted how mental disorders, such as bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and anxiety, have been portrayed in twenty-first-century American young adult fictions, aiming to help mental health professionals to more effectively address the needs of students combating mental disorders. Aspiring to think with, rather than about, psychiatric definitions of mental illness, in Madness, Art and Society (2018) Anna Harpin aimed to show how art can provide more inclusive and non-normative conceptions of mental disorders. And, most recently, W.J.T. Mitchell’s Mental Traveler (2020) has sought to unravel the limits of psychiatry by showing how his gifted son has been fighting schizophrenia while creating a film that could possibly visually express this severe condition. While artists and critics have sought to expand the boundaries of many art forms to reflect on mental disorders, the medium of photography has largely been used, until very recently, simply to capture the gaze of the person suffering from a specific condition, a regressive practice that goes back to the birth of the “clinical gaze” in psychiatry.

Photography and Mental Disorders: Then and Now In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, Michel Foucault coined the term “clinical gaze,” as referring to that which “refrains from all possible intervention, and from all experimental decision” (1963|1973, 108). This clinical gaze not only revealed a return to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century positivism, which insisted on the verifiability and impartiality of science, but it also signaled the introduction of photography to the field of psychiatry, a discipline that hitherto was not considered in terms of its empirical potentials (Fraser 1998). Being

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commonly celebrated as an objective medium in the mid-twentieth century (Bazin 1967), the clinical gaze of photography became an apt means for fabricating and documenting the types, taxonomies, and, in turn, the schemas of madness in psychiatry. Photography’s claim to universality, which was authorized by the clinical gaze of psychiatry, divulged the limits and shortfalls of schematizing madness. Instead of emphasizing the individual, relative, and transitory nature of mental disorders, the clinical gaze of photography pretended to capture the total range of expressions (Trifonova 2010), thereby diminishing the psychological to the physiological: the invisible to the visible. In doing so, the clinical gaze perceived the human body as an “archive of data” to be examined, “functioning either as the visible register of character and pathology or as a storehouse of unconscious meanings” (Hoffman 2009, 5). Arguably the most infamous instance of exploiting the medical gaze was the photographic representation of hysterical bodies in late nineteenth century at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, where neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot utilized such a gaze to create a “typology of human beings” (Florsheim 2016, 404). Instead of listening to his patients, doctor Charcot opted for photographic seeing (Marneffe 1991), so as to affix a supposed universal schema of hysteria to alleged hysteric women who were kept in his “image factory” (Didi-Huberman 1983|2003). Charcot in Paris was not the only one, however, who learned how to manipulate the clinical gaze to produce a taxonomy of mental disorders; such a photographic practice was rampant across Europe. Around the same period, for example, renowned Hungarian psychiatrist Léopold Szondi also used photography to determine the supposed, inherited hysteric traits of his patients (Bergstein 2017); Romanian physician Nicolae G. Chernbach created a photographic atlas of the mentally ill based on the physiognomy of his patients at Marcutza Asylum in Bucharest (Buda 2010); and, at Holloway Sanatorium in London, local psychiatrists put together photographic case-books of the mentally afflicted English middle class on the basis of their physiognomy (Sidlauskas 2013). Whether it was at Salpêtrière, at Marcutza, or at Holloway, photographic documentation of the clinical gaze was prevalent in late nineteenth-century Europe, not only for clinical nosography but also for physiognomic certification of mental disorders. Consequently, the merger between clinical psychiatry and photography during this period resulted in the putative belief that the camera and the photograph were apt tools for communication about mental disorders among psychiatrists. What was evidently missing in this

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scenario, however, was the point of view of the patient: the one actually undergoing psychological pain. In other words, the abovementioned psychiatrists, either by becoming doctor-photographers themselves or by devising the photographic setting, did not only shape a fixed schema of mental disorders, but they also completely eclipsed the agency and the selfhood of their patients in communicating about their conditions. Rather than considering photography a “multicommunicational” tool between doctors and patients, capable of conveying inexplicable feelings and conflicting emotions involved in mental challenges, these doctor-photographers engaged in presenting “the case,” not “the person,” to the medical community (Rawling 2017). Such a quasi-empiricist, preferential, and monolithic take on photography and mental disorders, which looked at the patient instead of looking with the person, was gradually replaced by numerous collaborative and participatory methods and approaches in the course of the twentieth century. In recent decades there has been a growing interest in therapeutic uses of photography in which photographs are used no longer as probative representations, but, instead, as points of departure for a dialogue between the researcher and the participants (Erdner 2011). For instance, so-called phototherapy is included in the practice of psychotherapists as an integrated dimension of treatment. In Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in a Digital Age (2013) and “The Therapeutic Use of Photography” (2020), Del Loewenthal extensively discusses the use of photography by therapists. “Therapeutic photography,” as slightly different from phototherapy, is defined as “self-initiated, photo-based activities,” often without guidance by a therapist (335). In a more collaborative way, “metaphorical analysis” of photographs (Keats 2010) can showcase, for instance, how the metaphor of “facade” functions as a protective interface between the person and the suffering (Sitvast et al. 2010). “Evidence-­ based photography” is another contemporary method, which involves photographic assignments, such as taking photographs or making photo collages, in order to improve social skills, coping skills, self-esteem, and identity-consolidation in adults and adolescents (DeCoster and Dickerson 2013). Aspiring to reconstruct fragmented communications and broken dialogues in families with members suffering from severe mental disorders, photo-essays have been used to create an intimate space between the photographer and the photographed person (Sile 2018). To better understand the day-to-day experience of a person suffering from mental disorder, the “photo elicitation” method has been proven promising, which allows

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individuals to narrate their first-hand stories by taking photos of their moods and temperaments (Palmer and Furler 2018). Participatory photography (PP), and in particular “photovoice,” has gained significant popularity in recent years (Miller and Happell 2009; Evans et al. 2016; Buchan 2020). Being pivoted on group collaboration, “photovoice is a community-based participatory action research approach where participants take photographs and write accompanying narratives or are interviewed about the content in the images” (Mizcok et al. 2015). Such an inclusive and participatory method allows individuals within a community to become the maker and the narrator of the image, enabling them to describe their condition through image, text, and concomitant discussions about them. A more recent and personalized practice has been termed “digital daily practice,” which involves taking a photo every day to understand the affordances this unassuming photographic chore can offer (Brewster and Cox 2019). By specifically focusing on one condition, photography has also been used in the assessment of hoarding disorder (De la Cruz et  al. 2013), psychosis (Maniam et  al. 2016), narcissism (Barry 2017), borderline personality disorder (Brand et al. 2021), and dementia (Dooley et al. 2020). Although photographic uses and approaches have been revitalized among psychologists and psychiatrists over the past two decades, scholars in the field of photography studies hardly paid attention to this development. The only theoretical exception is the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the conjunction of photography and trauma studies, such as Ulrich Baer’s Spectral Evidence (2005), which ties the latency of trauma to the temporality of landscape photography; Margaret Iversen’s Photography, Trace, and Trauma (2017), which looks into the operational similarities between the photographic index and the index of traumatic experiences in the psyche; Allen Meek’s Trauma and Media (2010), which examines the role of photography in historical transformations of the Freudian theory of trauma; and Donna West Brett’s Photography and Place (2016), which studies the belatedness of traumatic experience vis-à-vis the aftermath genre. With the exception of PTSD in trauma studies, scholars of photography did not engage in studies centering on photography in relation to mental disorders, a lack that necessitated the formation of this volume on Psychosomatic Imagery.

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Psychosomatic Imagery Over the past few decades, numerous artists have used photography as a way of representing the content of mental disorders, or as a means of recovering from such conditions (as a kind of therapeutic photography). Among the many examples in the former category, one can think of Devin Mitchell’s Veteran Vision Project (ca. 2014), in which photography’s complicated relationship with the metaphor of the mirror is used to visualize living double lives. An example from the latter category is US Army veteran Shawn Augustson, who, since serving his country in Iraq, has been taking photographs in order to combat PTSD. For him, the bodily act of taking an image is as recuperative as the final photograph, underscoring how photography can intervene between a bodily activity and a mental process. The term “psychosomatic” refers to the interaction of the mind (psyche) with the body (soma); it refers to their co-dependence and co-existence. Consequently, by the term “psychosomatic imagery” this book refers to a specific trope of photographic images that deal with the body-mind interaction during the states of mental disorders. This means that instead of looking at photographs of mental disorders, this project aspires to comprehend the complexities of such conditions by looking into minor and major, temporary and permanent, and latent and manifest photographic representations of moments of disruption between the orderly and the disorderly mind. The theoretical funnel of “psychosomatic imagery,” then, is a means of instigating critical discussions about the invisible and concealed contents of mental disorders through visualizing the disrupted corporeal and distorted mental perceptions of the world. By bringing the seemingly disparate fields of mental disorder and photography together, this volume aims to critically explore the potential of specific photographic images for reflecting on, and communication about, the experience of mental disorders. To achieve this, this book addresses photography as an “intermediary” medium in the communication of psychosomatic experiences in mental disorders through discussing the applications of its inherent qualities, such as latency, opacity-transparency, absence-presence dichotomy, double exposure, blurredness, projection, framing, noise, disruption, and blind field. As such, by drawing on photographic lexicons, practices and approaches in relation to paranoia, PTSD, hysteria, psychosis, bipolar disorder, and Hikikomori (i.e., acute social withdrawal), this volume aspires to create a cohesive theoretical and analytical volume that contributes to

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the field of photography theory through introducing “psychosomatic imagery” as a specific trope of photographic images.

Structure of the Book Psychosomatic Imagery is composed of four parts and nine chapters. In Part I, called “Secluded Subjects and Sociable Objects,” Ali Shobeiri looks into the global prevalence of the phenomenon of Hikikomori through a commemorative photographic project called Goodbye Without Leaving (2021). Hikikomori describes the phenomenon of acute social withdrawal as well as the person who undergoes such self-imposed seclusion. By drawing on Bachelard’s method of “topo-analysis,” Casey’s notion of “place memory,” and the Nietzschean conception of “eternal return,” Shobeiri argues that Goodbye Without Leaving embodies the lived life of Hikikomori as an endless expansion of place and a boundless cessation of time (Chap. 2). Subsequently, Stefaan Vervoort examines the photographic project Objects as Friends (2011) created by the artists’ duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. This project deals with a series of still life photographs that depict strange configurations of banal objects in relation to conditions of depression and social dysfunction. Vervoort argues that the artists’ provocative use of depression as a metaphor for a society in decline resonates with the pathology of culture as defined in the past by Oswald Spengler and Hans Sedlmayr (Chap. 3). In Part II, called “Psychosomatic Disruptions and Distortions,” Laura Bertens looks at the photo-series After Image (1997) by Alexa Wright. The artist examines psychosomatic dysphoria caused by the phenomenon of the phantom limb through digital reconstructions of the lingering parts of phantom limbs in photo portraits of amputees. What is visualized, Bertens argues, is not the visual body, but its proprioceptive truth. While index as deixis points to the limb as present reality, diverse uses of trace help us understand the limb as echo and memory (Chap. 4). Next, Samuel Dylan Ewing examines how photographer David Nebreda stages his so-­ called photographic double in front of the mirror. Ewing discusses an exchange of photographic gazes between the camera and the artist, as well as a psychoanalytic exchange that takes place between the two, which may offer an indispensable perspective on these symptomatic experiences. Nebreda’s project implies that it is only through the psychosomatic dissolution of certain iconographic bodies from the history of Christian art that his own subjective resurrection may occur (Chap. 5). In the following

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contribution Karen D. van Minnen discusses the integrated reject and idiorrhythmic life-forms, as defined by Roland Barthes, in relation to mental health in contextualized portrait photography. Is photography a liberating force or does it reiterate mechanisms? If the first case-study of a masked soldier’s portrait confirms photography’s inclination to hide the visibility of the integrated reject, the second one shows how Barbara Ess’s pinhole photography acts as liberating force and redefines “dis-ease” through making explicit ghost feelings and distortion (Chap. 6). In Part III, entitled “Traversing Hysteria and Bipolar Disorder,” Paul Grace explores how photography’s signaling capacity may be limited by the orders of representation under which photographs are produced, by surveying artistic re-presentations of early photographs of ostensible mental illness in order to subvert their clinical truth-claims. Grace discusses how in Aura Hysterica (1992), a photographic project by contemporary artist Nicole Jolicoeur, the nineteenth-century photographs of Charcot’s patients at the Salpêtrière clinic are reconfigured and recontextualized. This artistic project is discussed in the context of Georges Didi-Huberman’s The Invention of Hysteria (Chap. 7). Next, Eric Patel focuses on the relationship between bipolar disorder and subjectivities in photography through the concepts of (in)visibility and spatiality/temporality in South Asian community-based image practices. In Acts of Appearance (2014), the photographer Gauri Gill co-authors images with Adivasis (Indigenous People of India) by inviting them to make and wear papier-mâché masks, aiming to convey different emotions and experiences. Patel argues that photography, when combined with access to transcultural mental health treatment options, can be an experimental site to move beyond hegemonic and reductive understandings of bipolar disorder (Chap. 8). In Part IV, called “Images Mediating Between Two Worlds,” Helen Westgeest investigates how views of phenomenologists on deviated perception can be related to meaningful disturbances in photographs in order to provide insights into how the selected images act as psychosomatic imagery, while also discussing disrupted visual experiences due to mental disorders. Focusing on Matthieu Zellweger’s photobook Worlds Beyond (2019) and several pictures by Lauren E.  Simonutti (2007–2011), Westgeest addresses three issues in particular: the photograph as compression and presence of multiple perceptual experiences, the photograph as veil between two worlds, and disturbed interaction due to disruptive frames (Chap. 9). Lastly, Ana Peraica focuses on those parts of the world that we cannot choose to see directly: the world behind our backs. This

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unknown world is referred to as the world of death in ancient myths. Through time, this world has been mastered through the use of rear-view mirrors and photo-cameras. Peraica focuses on selfies in front of cadavers, defining such selfies as “control images,” capable of mastering fearful mental illusions (Chap. 10). Despite the polyvocality and diversity of approaches, each chapter of this book focuses on a contemporary photographic case-study that is either implicitly or explicitly explored on the basis of the overarching theme of “psychosomatic imagery.”

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Choi, Incheol, et al. 2020. How COVID-19 Affected Mental Well-Being: 11-Week Trajectories of Daily Well-Being of Koreans Amidst COVID-19 by Age, Gender and Region. PloS One 16 (4): e0250252. de la Cruz, Lorena Fernandez, et  al. 2013. Photograph-aided Assessment of Clutter in Hoarding Disorder: Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Depression and Anxiety 30: 61–66. DeCoster, Vaughn, and James Dickerson. 2013. The Therapeutic Use of Photography in Clinical Social Work: Evidence-Based Best Practices. Social Work in Mental Health 12 (1): 1–19. Didi-Huberman, Georges. (1983) 2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dooley, Jemima, et  al. 2020. Everyday Experience of Post-Diagnosis Life with Dementia: A Cop-Produced Photography Study. Dementia 0 (0): 1–19. Dozois, David J.A. 2021. Anxiety and Depression in Canada during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A National Survey. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie Canadienne 62 (1): 136–142. Erdner, Anette. 2011. Photography as a Method of Data Collection: Helping People with Long-Term Mental Illness to Convey Their Life World. Perspectives IN Psychiatric Care 47: 145–150. Evans, David, et  al. 2016. Use of Photovoice with People with Younger Onset Dementia. Dementia 15 (4): 798–813. Florsheim, David Borges. 2016. Photography and the ‘Discovery’ of Hysteria. Psicologia USP 27 (3): 404–413. Foucault, Michel. (1963) 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Vintage Books. Fraser, Kathryn. 1998. The Photographic Insane. Cinémas 9 (1): 139–151. Gilman, Sander L. 1982. Seeing the Insane. New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers. Graham, George. 2021. The Disordered Mind. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Harpin, Anna. 2018. Madness, Art, and Society. London & New York: Routledge. Hoffman, Anne Golomb. 2009. Archival Bodies. American Imago 66 (1): 5–40. Iversen, Margaret. 2017. Photography, Trace, and Trauma. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Keats, Patrice A. 2010. The Moment is Frozen in Time: Photojournalists’ Metaphors in Describing Trauma Photography. Journal of Constructivist Psychology 23: 231–255. Loewenthal, Del, ed. 2013. Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography in Digital Age. New York: Routledge. ———. 2020. The Therapeutic Use of Photography: Phototherapy and Therapeutic Photography. In The SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods, ed. Luc Pauwels and Dawn Mannay, 333–349. London: Sage Publications.

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Maniam, Yogeswary, et  al. 2016. The Journey of Young People in an Early Psychosis Program Involved in Participatory Photography. British Journal of Occupational Therapy 79 (6): 368–375. Meek, Allen. 2010. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. New York & London: Routledge. de Marneffe, Daphne. 1991. Looking and Listening: The Construction of Clinical Knowledge in Charcot and Freud. Signs 17 (1): 71–111. Miller, Greg, and Brenda Happell. 2009. Talking About Hope: The Use of Participant Photography. Mental Health Nursing 27 (10): 1051–1065. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2020. Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Mizcok, Lauren, et  al. 2015. Recovery Narrative Photovoice: Feasibility of a Writing and Photography Intervention for Serious Mental Illnesses. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal 38 (3): 279–282. Nejat, Nemet, and Karen Rhea. 1998. Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: The Greenwood Press. Özdin, Selçuk, and Şükriye Bayrak Özdin. 2020. Levels and Predictors of Anxiety, Depression and Health Anxiety during COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkish Society: The Importance of Gender. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 66 (5): 504–511. Palgi, Yuval, et  al. 2020. The Loneliness Pandemic: Loneliness and Other Concomitants of Depression, Anxiety and Their Comorbidity during the COVID-19 Outbreak. Journal of Affective Disorders 275: 109. Palmer, Victoria Jane, and John Furler. 2018. A Room with a View: A Metaphor Analysis of Vietnamese Women’s Representations of Living with Depression Using Photo Elicitation. Visual Studies 33 (3): 251–263. Parker, Sharon. 2017. Mental Illness in Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC. Prinzhorn, Hans. (1922) 1972. Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration. New York: Springer. Rawling, Katherine D.B. 2017. ‘She Sits All Day in the Attitude Depicted in the Photo’: Photography and the Psychiatric Patient in the Later Nineteenth Century. Medical Humanities 43: 99–110. Richmond, Kia Jane. 2019. Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Real Struggles through Fictional Characters. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC. Rudenstine, Sasha, et al. 2020. Depression and Anxiety During the COVID-19 Pandemic in an Urban, Low-Income Public University Sample. Journal of Traumatic Stress 34 (1): 12–22. Sandblom, Philip. 1992. Creativity and Disease: How Illness Affects Literature, Art and Music. New York: Marion Boyars.

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Sass, Louis. 1992. Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. Michigan: Basic Books. Sidlauskas, Susan. 2013. Inventing the Medical Portrait: Photography at the ‘Benevolent Asylum’ of Holloway. Medical Humanities 39: 29–37. Sile, Agnese. 2018. Mental Illness within Family Context: Visual Dialogues in Joshua Lutz’s Photographic Essay Hesitating Beauty. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education 17 (1): 84–103. Sitvast, Jan E., et  al. 2010. Facades of Suffering: Clients’ Photo Stories About Mental Illness. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 24 (5): 349–361. Telles-Correia, Diego. 2018. Mental Disorder: Are We Moving Away from Distress and Disability? Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 24 (5): 973–977. Trifonova, Temenuga. 2010. Photography and the Unconscious: The Construction of Pathology at the Fin de Siècle. CTheory 9: n.p. Twenge, M. Jean, and Thomas Joiner. 2020. Mental Distress among U.S. Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Clinical Psychology 76 (12): 2170–2182. West Brett, Donna. 2016. Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany after 1945. New York: Routledge. WHO. 2000. Cross-National Comparisons of the Prevalences and Correlates of Mental Disorders. WHO International Consortium in Psychiatric Epidemiology. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78 (4): 413–426.

PART I

Secluded Subjects and Sociable Objects

CHAPTER 2

The Room Is the World: Reflecting on the Lived Life of Hikikomori Through Photography Ali Shobeiri

It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy. —Franz Kafka, The Zurau Aphorisms (1931/2006)

Anyone who has spent several consecutive days in a room, without conversing with others and moving elsewhere, can attest to Kafka’s prescription for solitude: that staying at home for a long time does not necessarily bring about indolence, but can open up the entire world to us. That world, however, is not always as auspicious as Kafka envisaged it to be, replete with ecstatic wonders and serendipitous encounters. Succumbing to a recumbent or sedentary lifestyle in domestic space can also usher one into the midst of an irreversible solitude. Since the beginning of the COVID-19

A. Shobeiri (*) Departments of Media Studies and Art History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_2

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pandemic, many of us have been subjected to involuntary quarantines, thus inevitably experiencing social isolation as a consequence of home confinement. While such an experience may have been novel to many people across the globe, it is nothing new to a hikikomori. This Japanese term refers to the phenomenon of “acute social withdrawal” as well as to the person who undergoes such self-imposed seclusion. As a phenomenon, it refers to a behavior containing elements of “social withdrawal,” that is, non-participation in society for at least six months, as well as “social isolation,” that is, absence of relationships with others (Krieg and Dickie 2011). Whereas once hikikomori was known to be peculiar to Japanese culture, this practice has meanwhile become a worldwide phenomenon. The individuals who embrace a hikikomori lifestyle confine their life to the boundaries of a single room, in which they pursue an ostensibly humdrum day-to-day life. It is a life in which one becomes voluntarily “homebound”, that is, being both “confined to home” and “searching for home” (Chen 2019, 11). To reflect on the lived life of hikikomori through photography, this chapter will examine the recent photographic work of Norwegian artist Atle Blekastad entitled Goodbye Without Leaving. In this commemorative photo research, Blekastad reconstructs from his memories the room in which his brother, who had been a hikikomori for over twenty years, took his life in 2012. The result is a 1:1 scale digitally constructed photographic print furnished by several downloaded photos that resemble the real objects in the room (Fig. 2.1). Instead of being the photograph of a place in the strict sense of the term, which implies the existence of the camera in a physical location, Blekastad’s digitally constructed photo features a “photographic place”: “a perceptible place that is embedded in the photograph as an image” (Shobeiri 2021, 67). It is a poignant yet hopeful photographic place about memory, loss, and undoubtedly the psychological toll of living one’s life as a hikikomori. By looking at Goodbye Without Leaving via an interdisciplinary prism informed by phenomenology, I will explore the issue of how photography can spatiotemporally manifest the lived life of a hikikomori. To achieve this, I will first unpack the recent sociocultural research on hikikomori to underline the causes and factors that may induce such a sweeping societal retreat. Next, I will employ Gaston Bachelard’s method of “topo-analysis” and Edward S. Casey’s notion of “place memory” to shed light on the

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Fig. 2.1  Atle Blekastad. Goodbye Without Leaving. 2021. Courtesy of the artist

conjunction of memory and place vis-à-vis Blekastad’s photograph. Fleshing out this crossover helps distinguish between the lived memory of a place, which belongs to the hikikomori who corporeally experienced the room, and the enlivened memory of place, as photographically reconstructed by the artist. Finally, by drawing on the Nietzschean notion of “eternal return” and Gilles Deleuze’s and Eduardo Cadava’s reinterpretations of this temporal concept, I propose that Goodbye Without Leaving embodies the lived life of hikikomori as an endless expansion of place and a boundless cessation of time: a unique psychosomatic condition reconstructed through photography. To do this, I will begin my analysis by explaining the etymology and symptomatology of hikikomori in relation to Blekastad’s photographic practice.

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Hikikomori: A Radical Social Withdrawal In Japan the word hikikomori has long been used in its derivative form as a verb, hikikomoru. As such hikikomoru is a compound verb consisting of two qualities: “to pull back” (hiku) and “to seclude oneself” (komoru). When individuals decide to leave their social group, such as their school or workplace, in order to seek isolation in their domestic space, they are described as hikikomotta: “that person who has withdrawn into seclusion” (Kato et al. 2011, 427). During this period, which may last for a few days, weeks, months, or several years, the individual is referred to as hikikomori. Although the first scientific study to include the phenomenon of social withdrawal in Japan dates back to 1978, when patients were diagnosed with “withdrawal neurosis,” the term hikikomori would enter mainstream culture twenty years later, when the prominent Japanese psychiatrist T. Saito included the term in the title of his book Shakaiteki Hikikomori: Owaranai Shishunki, translated as Social Withdrawal: A Neverending Adolescence (1998). Since then, the term hikikomori has been used as a noun to describe either the pathology of “acute social withdrawal” or the patient who undertakes such a radical retreat. After Ryū Murakami, the internationally acclaimed Japanese author, presented a hikikomori as the central character of his novel Parasites in 2000, this notion further gained terrain. Until recently, however, hikikomori was seen as a sociocultural syndrome unique to Japanese society, frequently associated with the word gamen, which can be loosely translated as “perseverance.” From 2004 to 2010 alone, it was estimated that between 410,000 and 1.5 million people were at the risk of suffering from hikikomori in Japan. In the highly competitive labor market of Japanese society, to embrace gamen means “to deny self-expression and personal gratification for the more important reward of fitting into the group” (Bennett 2020, 263). Despite sharing the former aspect of gamen, which thwarts societal expressiveness and self-­ indulgence, a hikikomori does not seek inclusion in any specific group. Instead, this individual will radically withdraw from society by tenaciously receding into the very constricted corner of the self, at one’s home and away from others. In a fervid manner, therefore, a hikikomori completely rejects social participation and its concomitant rewards by “pulling out of gamen all together” (264). While hikikomori was initially conceived as a syndrome specific to Japanese culture, recent international surveys have revealed its existence

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and prevalence in many other countries as well, including the United States, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Taiwan, Oman, Bangladesh, and Iran (Hamasaki et al. 2020). In fact, one of the decisive factors hampering the prevention and treatment of hikikomori is the difficulty in classifying it as a disorder that is culturally specific to Japan or as a “symptom of comorbid psychological disorders,” such as depressive disorder, social phobia, anxiety disorder, and personality disorder (Krieg and Dickie 2011, 61). This is why hikikomori, despite its inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary in 2010 (which defines it as “the abnormal avoidance of social contact, typically by adolescent males”), has not yet been incorporated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Kato et al. 2011, 428). Instead, the hikikomori syndrome was divided into two types: “primary hikikomori,” which refers to a person who shows the symptoms of the hikikomori phenomenon without being diagnosed with any psychiatric disease, and “secondary hikikomori,” which refers to an individual who suffers from a variety of severe mental disorders (Suwa and Suzuki 2013, 193). Although Saito initially had a different set of conditions for identifying the hikikomori syndrome,1 recent psychiatric research defines a hikikomori as a person who exhibits the following four criteria for a period of at least six months: (A) physical withdrawal (the person stays at home almost all day, almost every day); (B) avoidance of social participation (the person avoids nearly all social situations, such as school and work); (C) avoiding social relationships (the person avoids direct social interaction with family or acquaintances); and (D) distress in social life (the above hinders the individual’s social life). Individuals who fulfil all four of these criteria would be defined as hikikomori. (Kato et al. 2011, 430)

While some secondary hikikomori may be diagnosed with psychiatric disorders prior to their seclusion, others may develop such conditions during their confinements. In minor cases, for example, they may suffer from depression and anxiety, and in more severe cases they can experience 1  In 1988, T. Saito defined the following criteria for recognizing hikikomori syndrome: “i) sedentary lifestyle in which the person lives most of the days in their own home; ii) lack of interest in performing school or work activities; iii) persistence of the phenomenon for at least 6 months; iv) schizophrenia, mental disorders and other disorders are excluded from the syndrome; v) subjects that maintain interpersonal or social relationship are excluded from this symptomatology” (Magila 2020, 97).

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psychotic and delusional experiences (Yasuma et al. 2021, 1–6). Needless to say, the most grievous case is when a hikikomori decides to put an end to such a self-imposed and repetitive cycle by taking one’s life. Instead of viewing social withdrawal as a sign of incapability, deficiency, and abnormality, contemporary interdisciplinary research into hikikomori aspires to destigmatize this global phenomenon by seeing it as a willful “desire for solitude” (Chen 2019). From this angle, a hikikomori is a person who recalcitrantly decides to reside outside the prevailing norms, systems, and discourses of social relationships through a “passive protest” (Berman and Rizzo 2019, 802–3). A hikikomori’s rebellion against imposed ideals, however, takes place within the architectural boundaries of a room, in which one’s sense of self remains shielded from the unwanted expectations and demands of society. For a hikikomori in turn “the bedroom becomes a counterforce of near-total ipseity, an obscure philosophical world that describes a virtual world devoid of the discomforting influences of others on an individual’s identity” (Chen 2019, 13). In other words, by rejecting putative ways of living, a hikikomori chooses seclusion over inclusion, repetition over newness, and domestic security over ontological anxiety, thereby turning one’s bedroom into a miniaturized yet innocuous space coinciding with the world as a whole. In this case, the bedroom becomes a domiciliary battlefield in which and by which hikikomori expose their ceaseless rejections of communal conventions. It is in this self-made and self-imposed sanctuary that hikikomori safeguard the fragile core of the self from the outside world. Therefore, to understand the lived life of hikikomori one needs to delve deep into the intricate and intimate rapport hikikomori have with the room in which they enact their passive protest. For hikikomori, it is this very room that imbricates and implicates the entirety of time and space within its fabric. Such an investigation of hikikomori is precisely what Atle Blekastad has dexterously fleshed out in Goodbye Without Leaving. Aiming to raise awareness about the prevalence of the hikikomori syndrome in Norway, in 2021 Blekastad exhibited Goodbye Without Leaving in the Netherlands. In this commemorative photographic research, he attempted to conceive and perceive the lived experience of his deceased brother by digitally constructing the room in which he had been living as hikikomori for over two decades. After his attempted suicide in 1988, Blekastad’s brother stopped attending school and gradually slid into seclusion within his parental home. Living in his childhood room for over twenty years and avoiding any kind of social contact during this period, his home isolation ended in late 2009, when he was admitted to a psychiatric

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hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. During his treatment, Blekastad’s mother decided to sell the house in which both Atle Blekastad and his brother grew up. This unforeseen decision left his brother with no option but to go to a welfare-provided apartment after being discharged from the psychiatric hospital. Due to the lack of adequate psychiatric support and knowledge about the underlying cases of acute social withdrawal, the brother eventually decided to take his own life on February 22, 2012. Around a decade later, Blekastad digitally reconstructed the room where his brother spent over twenty years of his life as a hikikomori (Fig. 2.1). This photographic place underscores that hikikomori is not merely a Japanese syndrome, but a global phenomenon in need of immediate recognition. Based on Blekastad’s fragmented memories of his brother’s room, this photographic place allows us to imagine a myriad of possible ways with which the lived body of a hikikomori once interacted with the architectural space. In order to better understand how the hikikomori lived in the room, I will next look into Blekastad’s photographic practice in relation to Casey’s notion of “place memory” and Bachelard’s method of “topo-analysis.” In doing so, it will become possible to situate the lived life of a hikikomori at the crossroad of memory and place: the conjunction that is photographically constructed in Goodbye Without Leaving.

The Lived Place of Hikikomori What is contained in place is on its way to being well remembered. What is remembered is well grounded if it is remembered as being in a particular place. —Edward S. Casey, Remembering

As philosopher Edward S. Casey reminds us, the act of remembering is essentially place-bound and place-dependent. In other words, to remember an event or a thing is to remember it “in a particular place,” in which that particular entity made its first appearance in time and space. For, as Casey contends, “places are potently receptive and preservative of memories” (2000, 213). It is precisely through their containing power that places allow us to sediment our memories in and through them, thus functioning as mnemonic frameworks whereby we remember the past. Casey concisely argues that, by safeguarding past events within its “self-­delimiting parameters,” place “is a mise en scène for remembered events” (189). But places, like memories, do not only function as containers of things and events, but also as mergers of their seemingly disparate contents. If we

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conceive of human remembering as an act of amalgamating diverse moments of time in order to create the illusion of continuity, place can perform a similar role. When fragmented memories of the past gain unicity and lucidity, “any given place serves to hold together dispersed things, animate and inanimate; it regionalizes them” (202, original emphasis). Drawing on functional similarities between place and memory, Casey argues that remembering is essentially an act of “re-implacing”: In remembering we can be thrust back, transported, into the place we recall. We can be moved back into this place as much as, and sometimes more than, into the time in which the remembered event occurred. Rather than thinking of remembering as a form of re-experiencing the past per se, we might conceive of it as an activity of re-implacing: re-experiencing past places. (201, original emphasis)

Rather than understating remembering as a temporal return to the past, Casey conceives of it as a spatial conveyance by which we can “re-implace” ourselves in “past places.” The question is now: what exactly do we remember when we “re-implace” ourselves in the past? Or, in other words, what does one remember when the act of remembrance equates with reassembling the constituents of places in the past? To develop this concern, we first need to know what constitutes a place. Geographically speaking, places are made of three main components: location, locale, and sense of place. It is through the conflation of these three aspects that a place, to use an adjective coined by Casey, gains its “placial” status. The term location, according to geographer Tim Cresswell, “refers to an absolute point in space with a specific set of coordinates and measurable distances from other locations.” Location pertains to the “‘where’ of place” (2015, 1). In the case of Blekastad’s photographic place, location refers to the specific latitude and longitude by which one can access the real physical room in Norway; it is the “where” of a hikikomori’s place. The term “locale,” however, “refers to the material setting” of a place that constitutes its appearances: it is “the way a place looks” (1). In other words, while “location” addresses the exact point at which a place is situated, the term “locale” describes the material assembly that gives a particular look to that place. For instance, in relation to Blekastad’s photograph, locale refers to the Iron Maiden and Pink Floyd posters on the walls, the imbricated red-green-white curtain on the right side, the crimson door on the left side, and the empty bed in the middle of the room. The locale of this photographic place includes all the material

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Fig. 2.2  Atle Blekastad. Mind Map. 2021. Courtesy of the artist

components that once furnished this hikikomori’s room in Norway and now ornament its photographic reconstruction. The last and arguably most intimate and intricate element of place is “sense of place,” which refers to the “unselfconscious intentionality” that situates places at the “centres of human existence” (Relph 2008, 43), a requisite concept to which I will soon return. To recognize the act of remembering as re-­ implacing, by which we can re-live past places, one needs to reconstruct all the components of place: locale, location, and sense of place. In such a place-based mode of remembrance, the locale plays an essential role, for without their material supports, places would be exposed to an ineluctable disappearance in time: they would be irreversibly forgotten. To remember his brother’s room via re-implacing, Blekastad had to first search on the internet for all the objects that he could remember from the actual room, that is, he had to gather the locale of place. As shown in Fig. 2.2, the result of such a free-floating memory exercise was a clutter of

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images with no particular contiguity. Summoned from the past without any spatial coherence, such a mélange of images resonates with what the philosopher Siegfried Kracauer once referred to as “memory images”: a jumble of recollected things that lack the spatial continuity of photography. From the perspective of photography, Kracauer wrote, “memory images are out of kilter” (1927/2014, 31). To make these recalled but disorganized images into a photographic whole, Blekastad had to resort to a place-bound remembering technique devised by the ancient Greeks, called “method of loci,” also known as “art of memory.” Through such an effective “mnemotechnique,” Casey explains, “a given place or set of places act as a grid onto which images of items to be remembered are placed in a certain order. The subsequent remembering of these items occurs by revisiting the place-grid and traversing it silently” (2000, 183). In other words, the method of loci allows us to use places as mental frameworks, virtual grids, or as spatial scaffoldings onto which we can project the fragments of the past, in order to remember a particular event, place, or a person by revising such a “place-grid” in our mind. It is this method that propelled Blekastad to create an initial drawing of the room and a digital sketch thereof, which are visible in the background and the upper side, respectively, of Fig. 2.2. Having now gathered the various elements comprising the locale of the room and sketched its virtual parameters, the question is: how does one dispose of the locale of such a place in order to enliven it with human presence? Or, put differently: how did Blekastad manage to instill this room with the lived and corporeal life of hikikomori? The answer to this question lies in “the customary body,” a concept coined by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. According to Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are composed of two distinct layers: “the body at this moment” and “the customary body.” While the former is in charge of instantaneous experience of the world (as one touches a doorhandle in a room), the latter is based on the mental exercises of the body in space (as one imagines touching a doorhandle in the mind). It is owing to the customary body, or such an “impersonal being,” that we feel spatially inhabited in our environs (1945/2002). To clarify this point, Merleau-Ponty exemplified the ways with which humans utilize spatial prepositions: When I say that an object is on a table, I always mentally put myself either in the table or in the object, and I apply to them a category which theoretically fits the relationship of my (customary) body to external objects. Stripped of this anthropological association, the word on is indistinguishable from the word “under” or the word “beside.” (116, original emphasis)

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Because of the customary body we tend to say, for example, that the book is on the table, rather than the table is under the book, as the former corresponds better to the mental positions and orientations of such an “impersonal being” in space. In order, then, to infuse his image with the lived experiences of human habitations, Blekastad had to dispose of the recollected images of the objects in the room according to the functions of the customary body in space. This is how the viewer of Blekastad’s photograph can try to imagine the bodily inhabitations of hikikomori in the domestic space, because the customary body can make us feel not only inhabited in the present, but also domesticated in past places. As explained by Casey: It is this customary body that not only finds but makes the surrounding bedroom familiar and thus habitable; and it does so by allowing initially unfamiliar-seeming objects to find their own “right places.” … Such work of the customary body is (thus) domesticating in function; it forges a sense of attuned space that allows one to feel chez soi in an initially unfamiliar place. It does so in a manner quite analogous to the way in which the same body, through its own remembrance, feels already at home in the past places which its memories summon up. (2000, 193)

By taking the position of the customary body in arranging the locale of the room, Blekastad has attempted to embody the inhabitational experiences of hikikomori in space, thereby demonstrating how one can feel in situ in a past place. Knowing how the customary body can breathe new life into unfamiliar places by endowing them with bodily directions and orientations, Blekastad’s photographic place invites viewers to walk through the room, sit at the table, and lay on the bed in their imagination, and thereby momentarily feel inhabited in the domestic space of hikikomori. In other words, by projecting the correct schemas of space onto the “place-grid” summoned from his memories, Blekastad has created what Casey calls a “place memory”: a place-cum-memory that requires bodily remembrance as much as mental recollection. Containing and synthesizing what they enclose, place memories congeal the memories of the past through corporeal implacement. That is why, for Casey, “they are as much in us as much as we are in them” (193). Instead of being memories of places in the world or places of memories in our mind, place memories point to the indivisible ontological and existential rapport between memory and place—to their co-existence and co-operation. Within the framework of “place memory,”

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in the words of philosopher Dylan Trigg, “place is not simply the context on which memories hang, but the very texture of the specific content itself” (2012, 53). To gain their full potential, however, place memories need to be replete with the third constitutive element of place as well: sense of place. In general terms, sense of place refers to the “feelings and emotions a place evokes” (Cresswell 2015, 1). It is this subjective aspect of place that makes the same place unique to each individual, for how we are attuned to a place is rooted in the exclusive sentiments we have experienced in that place. Through such an affective feature of place, one’s childhood room is made distinctive and thus indelibly registered in one’s memory. To explore such an eccentric and intimate feature of place, Bachelard developed the method of “topo-analysis.” Drawing on geography, psychology, phenomenology, and poetry, he defined “topo-analysis” as “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (1958/2014, 30)—our room being the most profound instance. By means of topo-analysis, we may not only grasp the vital role of the sense of place in the creation of memories but also realize how some of our most deep-seated memories are essentially localized in particular places. To recall the feelings and emotions sedimented in one’s room, Bachelard writes: The topo-analyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming? (1958/2014, 31)

It is through asking these seemingly banal questions that the topo-­analyst enters into a past place in which a person’s inmost sentiments regarding domestic spaces can be remembered. Stepping into the role of a topoanalyst, Blekastad, too, had to ask: did the hikikomori feel ensconced in the room? Was the bedsheet warm during the nights? Was the curtain shut and the bed lamp on during the days? Would listening to the cassette player throw him into solitary daydreaming? For Bachelard, getting lost in daydreams is the archetypical case for grasping the inner experiences of a person in the architectural space of a room, for “daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity” (201). Beyond dispute, hikikomori, like Blekastad’s brother who has lived most of his life in one room, master daydreaming during their

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lengthy social retreat, however, not only to distract their attention from the present but also to transport themselves into the outside world. For Bachelard, it is the projective mental state of daydreaming that allows a solitary person to feel the “immensity” of existence as a whole in one’s room. While daydreaming, Bachelard notes: Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. (202, emphasis added)

While voluntarily confined to one’s own room, involuntarily daydreaming interjects itself into hikikomori’s life cycle, thus allowing one to experience immensity via the intimate corner of one’s room. This means that hikikomori, as not being willing to leave their room, can instead expand their domestic space onto the external world through incessant daydreaming. In Bachelard’s topo-analytical model, such a solitary experience of one’s room conduces the feeling of “intimate immensity”: a situation in which daydreaming blends the space of architectural intimacy into the infinite space of the world. Bachelard links up such an adjoining of experiences with the theme of “correspondence”: Immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity. It is the principle of “correspondences” to receive the immensity of the world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being. They institute transactions between two kinds of grandeur. (210, emphasis added)

It is precisely through daydreaming in solitude that the intimate inner space and the infinite outer space find their “coexistentialism.” That is to say, through the conceptual framework of “intimate immensity” a solitary person will feel the grandeur of the universe within the intimate depth of inner experience and in one’s room. “When human solitude deepens,” Bachelard asserts, “the two immensities touch and become identical” (219). However, the existential correspondence between intimacy and immensity is not just peculiar to a social recluse. For example, while gazing at mirrors for a long time, many of us have caught ourselves engrossed in daydreams, as if the gazed-upon mirror had momentarily teleported us outside the enclosed domestic space. In this situation, the mirror becomes

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a window to the world beyond, a gateway to the unknown, which enables daydreamers to creep into the splendor of an external world through their imagination. Looking at the center of Blekastad’s photo, we see the reflection of a large-format camera in the mirror, although without the presence of any photographer. This affixing and transfixing gaze of the camera at the mirror conjures up how hikikomori would voyage along a deluge of thoughts while being lost in daydreams. As such, in this situation, the mirror functions as the metonymic agent of the external world and the camera as the metaphoric surrogate for hikikomori. Although we are not able to see how hikikomori would fall into the transitory but transmogrifying experience of daydreaming, we are obstinately reminded of such a psychological teleportation by the camera’s pensive gaze. Placed in the center of the room, it is the camera’s silent gaze that puts us in relation to a hikikomori’s solitary drifting into fantasies. This specular gaze in the center of the room stands for hikikomori’s repetitive daydreams, evincing how the intimate space of one’s room can conjoin with the infinite space of the universe through the conduit of daydream: a coexistentialism par excellence. In other words, this is how topo-analysis infuses a room with sense of place, including the buried sentiments therein, thereby allowing a “place memory” to exponentially expand in circadian reveries. This is how an oneiric exercise allows an endless expansion of place under the rubric of “intimate immensity.” Having discussed how the lived life of hikikomori can be seen as a perpetual augmentation of place in the mind’s eye and through daydreams, I now turn to a specific temporality that may help better understand hikikomori’s lived experience of time during their voluntary social retreats.

The Lived Time of Hikikomori Signing off from the dull absurdity of the adult world, hikikomori become the centre of a story with endless restarts, a tale with magic and wonders as given. —Xi Chen, “Homebound”

What does it mean to live a life that is marked by “endless restarts”? How can we envisage a temporality that is endowed with ceaseless renewals? Even if we can answer these questions, a more baffling inquiry would be: what constitutes the present, the past, and the future of a time that is ineluctably bound by repetition? Besides hikikomori who possess the lived

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experience of such a rarefied sense of time, in which the distinction between today, yesterday, and tomorrow seems to dissipate, it is the Nietzschean idea of the “eternal return” that can shed light on such a temporal conundrum. Aspiring to reconcile many ontological couples, such as past/present, same/difference, and being/becoming, the Nietzschean concept of “eternal return” suggests that all events in the world eternally repeat themselves in the same sequence. Besides the existential weight imposed on the history of Western philosophical tradition by the audacity of this idea, the temporality of eternal return has prompted many art and cultural critics to consider the concept of time anew.2 Being both a physical and cosmological doctrine, the concept of eternal return suggests that the universe and the entirety of existence have been recurring and will continue to recur an infinite number of times. In his distinctive, maverick writing style, Nietzsche first introduced the idea of “eternal return” in a passage in The Gay Science. In a paragraph entitled “The Heaviest Weight,” he writes: What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the tress, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! (1882/2001, 194)

For many of us, having been accustomed to circadian rhythm, through which each new dawn proceeds a former dusk so as to promise the novelty of a day, the concept of eternal return poses several daunting questions: what if we are to live the same life over and over again? What if everything we experienced today—from walking, talking, and eating to writing and thinking—will come back to us tomorrow in the exact same order? In short, what if tomorrow brings nothing new but the repetition of the same day without end? Such existential inquiries have been explored, albeit in comical fashion, in several contemporary films, such as Harold Ramis’s 2  See, for example, Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, in which the idea of “eternal return” is presented through Sisyphus’s commitment to repeatedly rolling a stone up the hill without end (Camus 2000).

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Groundhog Day (1993) and Max Barbakow’s Palm Springs (2020). In both of these cases, the film’s protagonists are stuck in a time loop that forces them to perpetually live the same day: waking up from the same bed, meeting the same people, using the same apparatuses, taking the same road, and so on. In these scenarios, the only way to break away from such a monotonous cycle is via a willing acceptance of this temporal state. According to philosopher Catherine Malabou, thanks to the affirmation of repetition, an alliance between “the circle of eternal return” and “the singular life of the one who has revelation about it” comes into being (2010, 26). In this way this Nietzschean doctrine can escape the popular culture clichés, because from this angle, after all, “the eternal return is not only the hourglass turned over and over again of all things in their neutrality, their banality, or their anonymity, but a life that sees itself return” (24, original emphasis). For the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, this singular life, which sees itself returning in a never-ending cycle, is always defined by a willful choice. Making acute observations on the idea of eternal return in Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze succinctly writes: “It is the thought of the eternal return that selects. It makes willing something whole. The thought of the eternal return eliminates from willing everything which falls outside the eternal return, it makes willing a creation” (1962/2013, 64). As Deleuze suggests, it is the willful selection of the eternal return that singularizes such a circular temporality and makes it particular to a life, to a subject, precisely to the one who willingly embraces this thought. If not endlessly, hikikomori are among the few individuals who temporarily exercise the thought of eternal return, by selecting the same over the new, by obstinately living the same life during the period of their voluntary isolation. It is this willful choosing of a solitary life infused with the repetition of sameness that brings hikikomori face to face with the idea of eternal return. Needless to say, in a life that is defined by perpetual returning of the same, the very idea of linear time comes to an inevitable collapse, for, as Deleuze reminds us, the time of eternal return “must be simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come” (45). As a direct consequence of such an uncanny temporal conflation, the ontological frameworks of being and becoming are essentially enmeshed. That is, within the Nietzschean framework of eternal return the progression of time becomes simultaneously its stagnation, because the same time, or the same day or the same week, comes about ad infinitum for the denizen of eternal return. To understand such a temporal dissonance, in which past, present, and

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future are fused together under the heading of returning, Deleuze proposes the following: All we need to do to think this thought is to stop believing in being as distinct from and opposed to becoming or to believe in the being of becoming itself. What is the being of that which becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming: Returning is the being of that which becomes. (44, original emphasis)

This means, within the Nietzschean principle of eternal return “returning” itself is the primary mode of existence, through which the invariability of being is enmeshed with the variability of becoming. It may, however, sound unimaginable to discuss such an incompatible temporal model apropos the medium of photography, because photography has been typically defined by stillness and immutability: with its ability to eternalize the unique existence of the photographed subject in time. To illustrate this point, one needs to recall the multitude of metaphors used to describe photographic time: for film theorist André Bazin, photographic time was like a process of “mummification” (1967/2004); for philosopher Stanley Cavell time was somewhat “moulded” in photos (1979); for essayist Susan Sontag time was as though “frozen” in the frame (1977); for semiotician Christian Metz time could be “sliced out” of an ongoing stream and kept in the photo (1985/2003); and for literary theorist Roland Barthes it was indeed such fixity and stasis that would infuse the photograph with the “punctum” of time: the inedible “that-has-been” of the photographed subject that was recorded in the past but confronted in the present (1980/2000). What all these temporal allegories and concepts have in common is the persistence to subsume photographic time under the philosophical pole of “being,” the fixed and the immutable, instead of under the opposite pole of “becoming,” the fluid and the mutable. To liberate photographic time from the supremacy of “being,” art historian Jonathan Friday coined a contradictory term: “stillness becoming” (2006). While drawing on the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed everything in the world is in the state of constant change, or becoming, Friday notes: Every materiality we know of is subject to a more or less apparent process of continuous change over time, with some, like rivers, managing to persist despite being in a condition of radical flux. … So when Heraclitus famously remarked that “you can never step into the same river twice,” he was posing

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an apparent paradox: the river you step in on two different occasions both is and is not the same river. (45–46)

While the steadfast essence of the river marks its being, which suggests immutability and stillness, the fluctuating essence of the river constitutes its becoming, which suggests mutability and fluidity. Similar to the Heraclitus allegory of the river, which is concurrently fixed and moving, Friday proposes that photographs are, too, simultaneously still and changing, thus existing via the paradoxical temporarily of “stillness becoming.” Evidently, in order to think of photography through the temporal model of “stillness becoming,” one needs to insert motion into the putative immobility of the photographic image. It is also via such an oxymoronic temporal model that it becomes possible to examine the Nietzschean idea of eternal return in relation to Blekastad’s photographic place. Friday suggests that there are two ways to endow photographs with the fluidity of becoming: considering the material alterations of photos in time and acknowledging that, despite the photographed subject in the frame, the real subject in the world is disposed to change. Yet, one may further argue: what if, like Blekastad’s digitally constructed photo, the subject matter (i.e., hikikomori) is not even presented in the image? Or what if, due to digital manufacturing, there is no material basis for the photo that can erode and corrode and thus change in time? How, then, would photography be able to exhibit a “stillness becoming,” or an “eternal return,” through which the stillness of being could coalesce into the flow of becoming? The answer to this question lies in literary theorist Eduardo Cadava’s reinterpretation of the concept of eternal return in connection with photography. As Cadava puts forward, “[T]he thought of eternal return is a thought of technological reproducibility” (1997, 31), the feature identified by Walter Benjamin as an intrinsic potential of photography in the 1930s (1935/2007). If Cadava equates the technological reproducibility of photography to the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return, it is because both mechanisms operate via an everlasting recurrence of the same: the logic of eternal return is that time repeats itself endlessly in a self-identical form; the logic of technological reproducibility is that the same photograph can repeat itself infinitely through reproduction. The possibility of reproduction, intrinsic to photography, implies not only “that time repeats itself endlessly” when the photograph is reproduced but also “that what is

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repeated is a process of becoming, a movement of differentiation and dispersion” (31). For Cadava, it is this structural possibility intrinsic to photography that can instill each photo with the mutability of becoming; for having been reproduced, the same photograph can come to pass endlessly in time. In other words, for both Nietzsche and Cadava it is the possibility of returning as such that instigates and perpetuates the flow of becoming. What comes into being at the moment a photograph is taken, Cadava asserts, “is the reproductive mechanism at the heart of eternal return” (39). Such a conception of time, defined by the eternal return of the same, is precisely what has been given a new life in Blekastad’s photographic practice. Not having access to the hikikomori’s room, Blekastad had no choice but to accumulate a large corpus of reproduced photographs that would resonate with the actual objects in the room, such as the red chair, the black cassette player, the green drawer, the bed lamp, and the analogue TV shown in Fig. 2.1. Not only have these objects furnished the hikikomori’s room with the locale of place, as I discussed above, but they have also become irrefutable visual testimonies to the technological reproducibility of photography. Having been entirely constituted of reproduced photographs, every perceptible portion of Blekastad’s photo is thus marked by returning itself, thereby revealing how photography provides the possibility of perpetual resumption through technological reproduction. Like the eternal return that promises an interminable repetition of the same, Blekastad’s photograph exposes how a ceaseless returning can be achieved through photographic reproduction. It is, in Friday’s words, a sheer manifestation of “stillness becoming”: an incongruous temporality that interpolates the fluidity of becoming into the immobility of being. Still, as Cadava reminds us, the most effective reproduction is “the one that reproduces reproduction rather than the matter or event reproduced. Or rather, the matter or event is reproduced, but only as an altered reproduction” (36). In doing so, it becomes possible to think of mechanical reproducibility as the animating kernel of becoming, or as the prime agent of returning. To experience such an “altered reproduction,” which can exceptionally extend the process of reproduction itself, one needs to have a closer look at Blekastad’s photograph. In the center of the room and in front of the mirror, Blekastad has created and projected an incongruous black-and-white image onto the analogue TV. It is the image of another room, a more austere living space that bears some resemblance to the colored room that encloses it. It is a room within a room, which, if taken

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pensively, can display the temporal paradoxicality of eternal return. This second room is where Blekastad’s brother, the absentee of this photograph, spent several months immediately after his first attempted suicide in 1988. Located at his grandparents’ house, this room, and the short time spent therein, became the starting point of the hikikomori’s social retreat. As Blekastad explains: After his suicide attempt in 1988, my brother stopped attending school and gradually slid into his confinement. For him, time stopped in 1988–89. Apart from an increasing pile of music magazines, a steady rotation of newspapers and a CD player I bought him in the mid-1990s, nothing changed in his room. (2021)

If the mechanical reproducibility of photography promises returning, repetition, and resumption, the black-and-white room in Blekastad’s photograph reminds us that what keeps returning to hikikomori is the experience of sameness: same day, same room; same time, same space. It is this room within a room that can visualize the antithetical temporality of eternal return, in which yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all shackled together under the rubric of returning. In this situation, to use Deleuze’s words, “returning is the being of that which becomes.” In other words, it is this perspicacious mise en abyme that affirms that for this hikikomori time did not stop only once in 1988, but kept stopping every day until 2012. It is how Goodbye Without Leaving can embody a lived experience of time that is concurrently stagnant and swirl, still and moving, thereby allowing the flux of becoming to seep into the stillness of being amidst two rooms: a “stillness becoming” par excellence. As such, if the Bachelardian topo-analysis reveals how the oneiric act of daydreaming can create a boundless augmentation of place, the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return uncovers how the noetic act of returning can create a ceaseless stoppage of time. This is how Goodbye Without Leaving evinces the lived life of hikikomori as an endless expansion of place and a repetitive cessation of time, a situation in which one’s room becomes infinity and one’s day turns into eternity. It is this sui generis life, once lived by a hikikomori, which is forever monumentalized through photography: somatically spatial, psychically temporal.

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References Bachelard, Gaston. 1958/2014. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin. Barthes, Roland. 1980/2000. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage. Bazin, André. 1967/2004. Ontology of the Photographic Image. In What is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1935/2007. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken. Bennett, Elizabeth A. 2020. Alienating and Its Consequences: An Exploration of Marxism, Hikikomori, and Authenticity via Relational Connection. American Psychological Association 48 (3): 257–270. Berman, Noami, and Flavio Rizzo. 2019. Unlocking Hikikomori: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Journal of Youth Studies 22 (6): 791–806. Blekastad, Atle. 2021. Goodbye Without Leaving. Artist’s Website. https://www. goodbye-­without-­leaving.com/page-­01/. Cadava, Eduardo. 1997. Words of Light: Thesis on Photography of History. Chichester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press. Camus, Albert. 2000. The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays. New York: Penguin. Casey, Edward S. 2000. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflection on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chen, Xi. 2019. Hikikomori and the Phenomenology of Radical Social Withdrawal. Existenz 14 (2): 10–16. Cresswell, Tim. 2015. Place: An Introduction. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing. Deleuze, Gilles. 1962/2013. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Manchester: Bloomsbury Academic. Friday, Jonathan. 2006. Stillness Becoming: Reflections on Bazin, Barthes, and Photographic Stillness. In Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image, ed. David Green and Joanna Lowry, 38–54. Brighton: Photoworks. Hamasaki, Yukiko, et al. 2020. Identifying Social Withdrawal (Hikikomori) Factors in Adolescents: Understanding the Hikikomori Spectrum. Child Psychiatry & Human Development: 1–10. Kafka, Franz. 1931/2006. The Zurau Aphorisms. New York: Schocken. Kato, Takashiro A., et  al. 2011. Hikikomori: Multidimensional Understanding, Assessment, and Future International Perspectives. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 73: 427–440. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1927/2014. Photography. In The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, ed. Philippe Despoix and Maria Zinfert, 27–46. Zurich: Diaphanes. Krieg, Alexander, and Jane R.  Dickie. 2011. Attachment and Hikikomori: A Psychosocial Development Model. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 50 (1): 61–72.

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Magila, Marilena. 2020. Hikikomori: A Systematic-Relational Analysis. Health Psychology Research 8: 97–100. Malabou, Catherine. 2010. The Eternal Return and Phantom of Difference. Parrhesia 10: 21–29. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945/2002. Phenomenology of Perception. New  York: Routledge. Metz, Christian. 1985/2003. Photography and Fetish. In The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells, 138–145. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1882/2001. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Relph, Edward. 2008. Place and Placenessness. London: Pion. Saito, T. 1998. Shakaiteki Hikikomori: Owaranai Shishunki (Social Withdrawal: A Neverending Adolescence). Tokyo: PHP Shinsho. Shobeiri, Ali. 2021. Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. London: Penguin. Suwa, M., and K.  Suzuki. 2013. The Phenomenon of ‘Hikikomori’ (Social Withdrawal) and the Socio-Cultural Situation in Japan Today. Journal of Psychopathology 19: 191–198. Trigg, Dylan. 2012. The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Yasuma, Naonori, et  al. 2021. Psychotic Experiences and Hikikomori in a Nationally Representative Sample of Adult Community Residents in Japan: A Cross-Sectional Study. Frontiers in Psychiatry 11: 1–6.

CHAPTER 3

Objects as Friends: Depression and Photography in the Work of Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys Stefaan Vervoort

Discussions about the relationship between photography and mental disorder often follow two different paths. First, there is the debate on outsider art, in which photographic images express the creative urges of artists or amateurs wrestling with neurological afflictions like psychosis, schizophrenia, or depression, or where the artist emulates and reflects on such conditions by using photographic methods and techniques. This discussion typically conceives the photographic image as an index of the obsessions and personal cosmologies of the outsider, which in turn acts to examine the relation between art and madness, or the inclusivity and therapeutic role of art (Blackshaw et al. 2009; Sandblom 2009; Hoet 2013; Harpin 2018). A second debate focuses on early photo-portraits of hysteric patients, which served to characterize and classify mental disorders, channeling the medical gaze (Didi-Huberman 1982; Gilman 1982; Baer 2002, 25–60). This discussion, building on the eighteenth-century fascination for physiognomy, considers photography as a tool supportive of

S. Vervoort (*) Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_3

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scientific visualization and diagnostic knowledge—as a medium that can be linked to the field of psychoanalysis, whose emergence largely coincided with that of photography. On the face of it, Objects as Friends (2011) by the Belgian artists duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys seems far removed from these discussions. A series of 311 uniformly sized color prints, the work documents a dizzying variety of objects, staged as odd assemblies against the concrete floor and dull gray wall of the artists’ studio. Most objects seem utterly banal, from clothing and accessories, theatrical items and dress-up garb, and tools and machine parts to electronic devices and creative instruments, household or office items, and bedroom and bathroom articles. Some objects verge on being materials (straws, sticks, bamboo; clay or foam pieces; stones, etc.), while others resist description altogether (rags, paper wads, debris, “trash,” etc.). Chalk traces on the floor act as the only, if returning, indexical trace of their staging. The objects are recorded using a high-end digital camera and harsh flashlight. Some objects are amassed in a pile—such as a casual tossing of camera parts, remote controls, and electric leftovers (Fig. 3.1), or a heap of towels, a coat, and a purse—while others are shown standing erect, such as a bottle of soap, pliers, a glue stick, and a flashlight lined up in a row. Objects as Friends seems an impenetrable universe of things, a selection of “stuff” each item of which is more random than the next, yet all are afforded the same importance. The series, as noted by Thys (Küng 2012, 113), constitutes “an archeology of being-man, at once arbitrary and meaningless, radiated by anatomic light.” This quote implies that the randomness of the series reflects on a present-day state of human beings, as well as evokes the option that this photo-series might indeed be associated with the abovementioned debates on mental disorder. This chapter argues that Objects as Friends enquires into the relationship between photography and mental disorder on two related fronts. The first one pertains to depression as a metaphor to attack the conservatism traced by the artists in present-­day society, which recalls the pathological analysis of art and culture by Oswald Spengler and Hans Sedlmayr. The second front pertains to the artists’ use of photography as reflecting on these questions, which I examine by using theories about photography’s relation to dehumanized technology (Vilém Flusser) and death (Christian Metz), issues also explored in late 1960s Conceptual Art. By combining these two trajectories, it becomes possible to answer the question of how de Gruyter and Thys’ videos, in which the metaphor of depression features centrally,

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Fig. 3.1  Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Objects as Friends 299, color print mounted on mdf, 48 × 60 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artists

provide insights into the meaningful uses of photography in Objects as Friends and in the artists’ practice at large.

Depression in de Gruyter and Thys’ Videos For Objects as Friends, de Gruyter and Thys depicted things lying around in their studio, found on the streets of their Brussels’ neighborhood, or bought in knock-off stores. Most objects, however, came from the artists’ ever-growing repository of props, costumes, make-ups, and technical equipment used to produce their videos, photographs, and installations. Those familiar with their videos will identify a crystal ball, a set of prosthetic hooks (Fig. 3.2), and a rubber boot as props from Het Spinnewiel (2002); a tall hat and a pair of black gloves from Ten Weyngaert (2007); and a pair of Adidas slippers, clay heads, tools, and sculptures from Der

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Fig. 3.2  Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Objects as Friends 108, color print mounted on mdf, 48 × 60 cm, 2011. Courtesy of the artists

Schlamm von Branst (2008). Other items—such as foam heads, wigs and fake facial hear, or masks—served to dress make-shift, steel-frame dolls in the Skeleton Photographs (2009), the photo-series Klottemans (2009), and the video Das Loch (2010). Other objects were used in sculptures made after Objects as Friends (but referring to earlier videos), such as Der Dokter (2013) and Hildegard van Speck (2014). To grasp the meanings of these objects in Objects as Friends, it is worth revisiting first the artists’ videos and tracing some of their central themes. Since the late 1980s, de Gruyter and Thys, who studied at the Brussels’ art academy, have jointly developed a coherent and consistent, if multilayered, body of work, which focuses on human figures and behavior mainly using video. In the lion’s share of their videos, a group of typically immobilized and mute actors find themselves in secluded, stage-like, and oppressive spaces, looking at each other and performing gesticulating, bland,

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ritualistic, or violent actions. Using a voice-over recorded in a sluggish, child-like way, which acts as if the characters are speaking but is poorly synchronized, speech is disjoined from action. Actors rarely behave naturally; they move in the most mechanized of ways, with bodily actions going either too slow or too fast. Theater garb and accessories add to the strangeness and help denaturalize the scene. There is no sequence or plot beyond the immediate behavior of the characters. In fact, if de Gruyter and Thys’ videos display a chain of events, these are hardly natural or coherent. Objects and persons magically vanish and reappear; actions show no clear interrelation; and scenes are connected in an enigmatic, oft-­ obscure fashion. Het Spinnewiel, for example, opens with a static shot of a woman and male twins standing head-to-head in a forest. As the figures fade out, the video cuts to a small stage-like room fully clad in wood without windows and only a small, central door in the back. Here, the three characters reappear. In the first half of the video, the voice-over and gesticulating actions imply how the woman “disappears” into a crystal ball and, upon her return, reports of a visit to a magical two-dimensional “white world.” Following her commands, chairs, costumes, and characters start to change place and dance around the room; and when one of the twins decides to leave the space and “see the world,” he returns after a few seconds, stating he “has seen everything.” Seated on chairs, the trio is joined by visitors: a helmeted figure in motorcycle attire, who mutely inspects the characters and is in turn inspected, and a creepy, hooded figure wearing a jester-like mask, rubber boots, and gloves, who evidently scares the trio. In the video’s second half, the protagonists, along with a third, male visitor, stage a play. Fit with preposterous accessories—including make-up, party hats, and a cape—the men perform as the Sun King (visitor) and Sun Rays (twins), whose luminosity and happiness “shine upon the world.” All the while, the woman, who calls herself “the boss,” directs them, wearing a silly black mask and two prosthetic hooks (Fig. 3.3). When the Sun King stands in the wrong place, however, the woman freaks out and commands the twins to strangle him. The scenes are mixed with static shots of an abandoned room and its antique furniture, or of motionless and mute actors staring into the mirror or at each other. The video concludes by cutting back to the forest, where all the figures stand with an icy gaze or mindlessly drift around. What characterizes Het Spinnewiel and other videos by de Gruyter and Thys made in the 2000s is a disjunction of the constitutive elements of

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Fig. 3.3  Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Het Spinnewiel, video, color, sound, 34 minutes, 2002. Courtesy of the artists

theater and cinema. Besides muteness, one of the artists’ strategies is to use awkwardly long, static shots—moments frozen in time, like a series of photographs—to break down the storyline and stress the tension between characters, events, and the spaces in which they are set. Like the separation of “words, music and setting” advocated by avant-garde playwright Bertolt Brecht (1964a), de Gruyter and Thys’ videos undo the unified, immersive logic of theater. There is no overarching story, no God to assign meaning and coherence to this universe. Moreover, the artists’ cunning use of video techniques—such as the overall montage, the looping of mechanized behavior, the fast forwarding of actions, the fading of objects and persons, and the use of deformed sounds and organ soundtracks—amplifies the Verfremdungseffekte (Brecht 1964b), and these contribute to the characters’ staging as remote and cold, not expressing feelings. In fact, in the artists’ booklet published for their 2002 exhibition at Antwerp’s Middelheim Museum, de Gruyter and Thys (2002) suggested that at the

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heart of their practice is the arbitrary link between “characters,” “places,” and “stories,” which stresses the artificiality of the scene, effectively barring viewers’ identification with the story. Yet most distinctive of the videos by de Gruyter and Thys is how an avant-garde aesthetic is made to reflect on inwardness: of the characters, the story, and the space. In Het Spinnewiel, amateur actors or the artists’ family members play strange, classless persons caught in claustrophobic spaces, who seem to find comfort in seclusion. Characters are scared and refuse to go outside, or if they do, they immediately return indoors again. This focus was first announced by The Deserter (1997), a video that shows a man who withdrew into himself and lives mutely in a forest (the same natural habitat, perhaps, as in Het Spinnewiel). Using shots of text interspersed with the images, the video tells of a bureaucratic apparatus which feels threatened by the man’s taciturnity and orders “a psychological examination” to establish whether he is “hiding something.” The man is labeled dysfunctional, even a rodent, and, finally, declared dead. Centering on a man who withdraws from society and negates social conventions, The Deserter intimates how inwardness is socially disruptive and met with regulating actions or social control. In interviews, de Gruyter and Thys comment on this interest in socially “unadapted” characters and how their behavior at once negates and mirrors the patterns of a bureaucratic, overregulated society. “We are interested in these groups that wander about and the sad human aspects that are hidden or become proper to them, like depression, autism, power games, psychosis, sexual tensions and idolatry,” Thys observed (Haq 2013), adding that these activities “are also organized by a bureaucratic apparatus with the same sad characteristics.” Elsewhere, de Gruyter (Filipovic 2010, 177) described the videos as diagnosing a certain type of society: The characters in our videos all live in a kind of post-Third Reich regime. It’s a democracy in which socialist parties have become wellness clubs. The only thing that matters is a safe and healthy environment where one can live one’s life without suffering too much. Everything is focused on safety, physical well-being, and avoiding confrontation. Everything is flat and every issue is of the same importance. There is no reason to live, actually, because everything is discussed by a neutral brain somewhere and everything turns in circles. Everything ends at the beginning and there is no possibility of escape because there simply isn’t a way out. Giant depressions are the result

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of all this—depressions that people get used to and then start to consider, simply, “life.”

Here, the artists’ discourse invariably recalls the vast body of literature on man’s mental alienation in a modern world, from Marx and Durkheim to Benjamin and Simmel, as well as theories speculating on the absurdity of human existence and the meaninglessness of life. Specifically, the invocation of pathological tropes to signal alienation, as well as of a supra-human force controlling life and history, brings to mind the work of Oswald Spengler and Hans Sedlmayr, who lamented the avowed fall of norms and values in modern life and culture. Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1923), published in the wake of World War One, and Sedlmayr’s Verlust der Mitte (1948), which appeared following World War Two, diagnosed society as mentally defunct, and individuals as dysfunctional beings at the mercy of some compulsive sensibility or fate (Männig 2017, 35–65). For Sedlmayr, fear and hopelessness, madness and depression are key concepts to elucidate the disorderly state of art and society. A similar pathology can be found in statements by the artists duo, for example, when Thys (in Anguelova and Wiarda 2009) signals a “final stadium in the evolution—decline—of western civilization, a slow and gigantic implosion, a massive stand still, an epidemic attack of autism,” or de Gruyter (in Anguelova and Wiarda 2009) suggests that “society has become far too complex for human beings,” leading to “an enormous depression in which we all take part.” Concerning secluded spaces, de Gruyter’s description of interiors cited above also shows parallels with Sedlmayr’s description in 1948 of Biedermeier domesticity (2007, 35–36): The accent in domestic building is now on comfort and habitability. A liking for littleness comes into evidence; … indeed, it causes the whole bourgeois cosmos to be contained within the framework of such a room. … The point of reference of all the arts is the private human being—the private human being not necessarily as a solitary figure, but as a man who has withdrawn himself from the public world outside. … His breviary is the anthology of the classics, a little music in the home serves the spiritual needs to which the private chapel had previously ministered and his “inner cathedral” is the symphony.

The relation between these artists’ statements and the pseudo-pathology of Spengler and Sedlmayr implies a provocative, if also deeply ambiguous,

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discourse. The work and words of de Gruyter and Thys balance between a historically precise socio-political commentary and a broadly conceived pathological rumination about art, society, and existence. On the one hand, the artists have developed an obsession with cultural repression in 1930s and 1940s’ Germany, as well as with objects and persons that arguably resuscitate xenophobia or evoke the idea of a Teutonic superiority in the present. This interest is shared by Erik Thys, Harald’s brother, who, as a researcher and psychiatrist, has written a dissertation on art and eugenics in the Third Reich and the relationship between art and madness (Thys 2014; Thys 2015). De Gruyter and Thys have also referred to the surging protectionism and regression in today’s Europe, where people “turn to the past, to their ancestors and perceived history and traditions, to understand how to survive” (Anguelova and Wiarda 2009). On the other hand, what de Gruyter and Thys (2021) codify as depression is understood as a cross-cultural, trans-historical fear for the “outside,” an anxiety and a self-­ imposed seclusion that feeds into and, in turn, is nurtured by a wide spectrum of regionalisms, nationalisms, and chauvinisms. Notwithstanding their sardonic ambitions, the epidemiology offered by these artists threatens to collapse into cultural pessimism and exalts a generalized concept at the risk of losing grasp on the contingencies of everyday reality. The writings of Spengler and Sedlmayr, then, while widely rejected for their conservatism and generalization, are more apt to articulate the specificities and tensions within the artists’ practice than the socio-critical commentaries of, for instance, Foucault or Agamben. In fact, the artistic ambiguity pursued is reflected by their use of “depression” as a metaphor, as a substitute term yielding a telling image, but one that, in the very process, tends to veil the socio-historical questions at stake. Most importantly, while the artists’ psycho-pathological parlance is rife with ambiguity, it does intend to turn the diagnostic gaze around, onto those scenes, objects, and persons that symbolize and internalize cultural conservatism in present-day society. In targeting the reactionary backlash against modern culture as the genuine source of disorder and spark for irrational behavior, de Gruyter and Thys carve out a residue of hope in a world full of despair. This residue pertains not so much to the anticipatory hope for a better world to come, but rather, as we will see, to a hope for refutation of the world’s lines of division.

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Photography and Still Life in de Gruyter and Thys’ Photographic Work In this section, I will argue that, like de Gruyter and Thys’ videos, Objects as Friends reflects on depression and socially deviant conduct as symptoms of, and possible antidotes to, conservatism. In particular the items used in the artists’ videos seem to represent the anxious persons, enclosed spaces, and troubling narratives described above. Staged in enigmatic compositions, the make-believe hooks, crystal ball, and other stage props used in Het Spinnewiel serve as references to the protagonists of the video, as well as the mental and social condition of depression. A Panasonic portable camera, or its parts, which return(s) throughout the series, personify the eerie, mute man filming from behind a plant in Het Fregat (2009), a video in which a group of men and one woman voyeuristically stare at each other and at a blackened scale model of an eighteenth-century frigate. The same goes for the archaic tools and bourgeois art materials—clay, stone, wood, paints, chisels—which in Der Schlamm von Branst channel the creativity of a group of discontented individuals into therapeutic works of art. To grasp the meanings of these objects and of the way they are visualized in Objects as Friends, it is key to understand how the artists’ use of photography has developed over the years. Ignoring the use of photographs in the artists’ early project Keizer Ro (1993), in which portraits of fictive militia members and images of supposed test sites hint at a dictatorial state, the first use of photography as a distinct part in de Gruyter and Thys’ practice occurred in the mid-2000s. In Travaux Photographiques (2006), twenty odd black-and-white photographs depict persons and objects in a darkened, uniformly gray interior. Stupefied figures and costumed characters, such as a spandex-wearing hoodlum holding a stick dangling a sandwich or a black-faced and tall-hatted figure, as well as banal and quaint objects (a “magic” oval mirror, chairs and a desk, or a ladder), are staged in a space cut off from the world (Fig.  3.4). The series also includes three photos of outdoor sites, which evoke the provincialism of la Flandre profonde: a misty forest, a narrow street in a mid-size Belgian city, and a landscape showing outlines of detached houses and a windmill. The grainy look and obscurity of the photographs suggest that what is photographically depicted is not easily seen, or should remain hidden, such as the darkest recesses of social behavior and the forgotten margins of the psyche. The shadowy cosmos fraught with psychological tension and rife with fears and phobias visualized in Travaux Photographiques evokes the

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Fig. 3.4  Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Travaux Photographiques, black-and-­ white photograph, aluminum frame, 80 × 60 cm, 2006. Courtesy of the artists

flipside of petty-bourgeois Flanders, a provincial world founded upon orderliness, transparency, and the sane. By capitalizing on images of spaces that personify the unseen as a metaphor for the erosion of “bourgeois bodily and social well being,” the series hints at what architecture historian Anthony Vidler (1992, 167) has called “dark space.” In the next years, de Gruyter and Thys continued exploring photography as a medium to conjure up “dark space.” Photo-series realized as side-­ products of videos, or autonomous photo-series that would come to inform later videos, visualize objects or humanoid dolls in cramped, windowless spaces, rendered sharply in black and white. The atmosphere is still depressed and uncanny, capturing a shadowy universe where emotions are banned, creative clay hodge-podge substitutes for sculpture, and dolls are afforded personality. Yet now all actors have vanished. The photo-­ series Der Schlamm von Branst (2008), for example, shows an abandoned, windowless room with sculpted body parts and fragments, lying and

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standing on tables and pedestals. Rendered in black and white, the images depict details of a darkened space, in which the use of flash leaves little to no depth and creates an obscuring shade and a general gloom in the background. Deformed heads and faces, a punctured torso, and figurative sculptures missing limbs imply that the human is gone or has been obliterated, leaving behind nothing but worn clothes and substitute ephemera. Through the darkness of the world that remains, photography ominously shows that which is absent or invisible: the troubled psyche of the figures in the video and man himself. At this point, around 2009, Gruyter and Thys completely moved away from working with actors and toward the realization of works exclusively based on puppets made from make-shift steel frames. Untitled (Skeletons) (2009), a set of nine black-and-white portraits made in a nondescript space, captures such steel frames as minimally embellished with clothing and accessories (foam heads, wigs, masks, glasses, an umbrella), and accompanied by objects associated with the bourgeois interior (chairs, a table, glasses, a coat rack, etc.). A finger exercise in evoking the human figure with the most minimal and daftest of means, these images hint at an extreme phase of man’s alienation, a stage at which man, fully detached from life and history, has been reduced to an immobile, inapt, and emotionless creature (Fig.  3.5). If the actors and spaces in Travaux Photographiques and Schlamm von Branst still retain a degree of worldliness, the skeletons, set against a nondescript piece of wall and shot up close, truly appear to be “out of this world.” This was the moment, too, when de Gruyter and Thys realized Objects as Friends. If their videos explore the psycho-pathological state of a “depressed” world associated with the rise of conservatism, a world where, as their later photographs intimate, man has withdrawn into himself and has isolated himself from society, Objects as Friends stages an extreme result of this logic. In these photographs, man has disappeared if not become extinct, leaving behind only objects that testify to the regressive, depressed, and now abandoned world. In fact, depression is evoked on three interlocking levels. Firstly, many objects appear broken, dismembered, run-down, battered, or in fragments. Social and mental dysfunction is conveyed through the simple fact that these objects were once used, but cannot be used anymore, or at least not properly; an umbrella with a floppy frame will not keep you dry. Secondly, many objects hint at the bourgeois interior as a site secluded from modern life and allegedly protecting against the disgruntling effects of modern life. Slippers, bathrobes,

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Fig. 3.5  Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, Untitled (Skeletons), black-and-white print mounted on pdf, 84 × 119 cm, 2009. Courtesy of the artists

towels, or toothbrushes conjure up the soothing comfort and the cleanliness of the bourgeois home. Handcrafted pots, decorated vases, woven baskets, cameos and coins, embroidery, a family album, or small-scale reproductions of objects remind one of Sedlmayr’s picture of a “whole bourgeois cosmos” simulated indoors, a secluded life made bearable by images, and the “products of plastic art in miniature.” These items, tinged with affection and sentiment, substitute for the world outside and signal its absence at once. Thirdly, the technology and electronic apparatuses

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depicted strike the contemporary viewer as quaint. By 2010–2011, when smartphones had become pervasive and the world of media and communication had definitively shifted toward the digital realm, a Nokia cell phone, a walkie-talkie, a cassette box, or a CD seemed anachronisms. As de Gruyter and Thys turn the camera onto objects that substitute for the human body (clothes, bodily accessories, puppets, figurative things), the world outside (objects evoking places, activities, events), and history (memorabilia), Objects as Friends hints at the relationship between (still life) photography and the disappearance of life, or death. In his 1985 essay “Photography and Fetish,” Christian Metz argued how photography relates to the Freudian idea of fetish, a part-object substituting for the traumatizing aspects of the real, for life itself. The fetish as object means both loss and the protection against loss—like a baby’s pacifier replacing a mother’s breast. The photograph follows a similar logic: a static picture of a world now lost, its characteristic immobility and silence oppose the dynamic nature of everyday life. In Metz’s words: [T]he snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time. … The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later. Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return. (Metz 1985, 84–85)

Still life photography, as a picture of a world from which the human figure has been banished, is fit to articulate this parallel between photography and death. Invented as a distinct, if lowly esteemed, genre in seventeenth-­ century painting, still life is essentially a depiction of animate objects or material goods, of things (and life) in arrest. As art historian Norman Bryson persuasively argued throughout his Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990), seventeenth-century still life painting is not a depiction of “real life” or “nature”; rather, it is a fiction, a complex system of signs the understanding of which obliges knowledge of certain codes of representation—social, moral, economic, technical—specific to that time. The rift between the still life and the life it is presumed to depict is the rift between a closed narrative, self-contained signs, and shallow space, on the one hand, and dynamic flows, historical contingency, and unforeseen experiences on the other. In modern art, artists continued

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depicting such universes cut off from the world: even if still life was divorced from the ruling social class and expanded into collage, montage, and photography, it continued, as argued by curator Margit Rowell (1997, 17), to be “based on a yearning for possession of the real that, supplanted by a fiction, is perpetually deferred or denied. The genre’s objects are still distanced from their supposedly real models and still operate according to ideological codes of meaning.” Objects as Friends, in reviving such meanings of photography and still life, hints at the roots of, and puts forward a cure against, the world’s depressed state. The inanimate objects literally show things standing still, which, as we saw, is connected by the artists to a halt of historical development, or “an epidemic attack of autism.” The series can be linked to the freeze-frame, photography-like scenes showing vacated spaces and domestic objects in the artists’ videos, as in Het Spinnewiel. In fact, curator Dieter Roelstraete (2013, 55) has described the “silent” character of the photographs, which connects with the silence discerned elsewhere by Roelstraete (2009, 18–20) in the artists’ videos. Moreover, objects are shot in an equivalent, neutral manner, and no human hand can be discerned in the series’ production. Aside from the enigmatic, if unfathomable, set of objects chosen and staged by the artists, the series looks overtly systematic and mechanical, as if made by machines. Such conception of the camera-as-machine recalls the notion of “apparatus” advanced by philosopher Vilém Flusser (1983, 25): photography as a parallel of the “work-­ programming and work-controlling apparatuses” of post-industrial society, the camera as a programmatic “black box” (27) whose work and intentions remain obscure. Objects as Friends can be understood as a mere result of technocratic protocol and technology: the artists’ choice of a dry, serial, documentary format, and their use of an industrial LED lamp, the so-­ called Skypanel S60-C with a power of 6000 watts, together with a technical camera with a digital back of Japanese-Danish make. In fact, for Objects as Friends, objects were recorded twice and then reworked in post-­ production, so that objects and background would be seen in the same, unforgiving light. Not only are subjective choices regarding the production of photographs and the meaning of objects willfully missing, but the digital process also implies that, as argued by W.J.T. Mitchell (1992), photographs exist first and foremost as transmittable data, as information that bears no direct relation to the material world. In other words, Objects as Friends intimates that a surge of (digital) technology proffers a vast yet

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meaningless world, a technocratic society from which man has disappeared. As a cure for this depressed, dehumanized state, de Gruyter and Thys examine the blind spots of a totalizing, technocratic approach. Instead of reviving those features typically associated with bourgeois art photography as an antidote to the dehumanizing features of modern life—such as carefully selected and cropped views, strikingly visualized subjects, or conceptual experiments with the camera and development—the artists push the camera as an all-seeing machine and technocratic apparatus to its limits. Unlike the beautifully cropped and staged scenes in Travaux Photographiques and Der Schlamm von Branst, which retain a hint of humanism despite the criticism of social depression, Objects as Friends is the outcome of a wry scheme, a repetitive protocol. At the same time, most configurations look intuitive or irrational, guided by the artists’ whims or by their obedience to some illogical, foolish force. The objects selected in each image and the rationale guiding their arrangement remain vague and unmotivated—a quality that contrasts sharply with the technologically induced, crisp type of depiction. In fact, most configurations strike one as strictly formal, meaningless: objects are made to touch, cover, prop, or support each other in inept balancing acts—like plastic salad servers and an ashtray shaping a bridge of sorts—or they constitute subtle, formal assemblies, like the obliquely positioned toy blocks that echo with two slanting scotch glasses. Similarly, the documentation of over 300 arrangements of banal things is evocative of the absurdity of any system. Although the use of chalk alludes to a didactic scheme, there is no “order” or “system” to which particular objects belong, no norm that allows gauging their meaning and sense, either as individual items or as compositions. Here the artists’ way of working recalls the systematized photography in Conceptual Art, which exchanged the authorial gesture of the photographer for more “neutral,” preconceived types of work. Such systems, as noted by art historian Eve Meltzer, paralleled with then-popular ideas in structural linguistics and philosophy, which critiqued the idea of authorship and proposed that the subject and life itself were but the effects of a structural system of signs. Conceptual Art, Meltzer (2013, 33) writes, intimates that “everything is accounted for by the structural system, everything has been subsumed into its order of equivalences. Everything has been brought into absolute visibility, only now visibility is not a property of looking or even of the visual, but a figure of epistemic mastery.” Life

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and the author have vanished; yet Conceptual Art still attests to the system’s blind spots, the human gestures and the affects that linger beneath its surface. In late 1960s photography, deadpan images and photo-series created by artists such as Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Douglas Huebler likewise mined the humor and irrationality of the camera conceived as a system—that which Flusser called its “program.” Art historian Joshua Shannon has argued that conceptual artists working with (and writing about) photography used the camera as both more and less than a “recording machine”: a tool reflexive of a wider indulgence in facts and inhumane technocracy in the postwar era. Seeing these works as “assaults on traditional photographic efforts to locate and uncover the world’s hidden meanings,” Shannon (2017, 32) also sees “the humor and delicious absurdity in the art, its acknowledgement that any purely factual form of representation was ultimately impossible.” In Objects as Friends, a similar sense of absurdity haunts a state of total equivalence and visibility brought on by the camera as a factual machine. Indeed, the paradox is that de Gruyter and Thys treasure the quaintness of the objects, the strangeness of the configurations, and the absurdity of the series as a whole. The depression implied by the battered things and mimicked by the technocratic use of the camera is simultaneously valued as a poetic force, something that could withstand the conservative order from which the series can be found to arise. The harsh light ultimately cannot illuminate these objects, and the sheer number of images along with the banality of objects and their configurations raise questions about the goal and sense of it all. In fact, the diversity of objects defies the categorization so dear to conservative society, while the idiom of “anatomic light” is canceled in those images where mirrors or shiny surfaces capture and reflect the flashlight. Moreover, the sequence of the work is not fixed, nor is its limits stable. For the first display of Objects as Friends, at Kestnergesellschaft Hannover in 2011, de Gruyter and Thys showed 168 photographs in sets of 4 on freestanding walls, while in 2012, more sizable, yet still incomplete selections were presented in 1 or 2 linear strips at Culturgest in Lisbon and Ostend’s Mu.ZEE (Fig. 3.6). The artists made a book featuring images without explanation; yet again, the number and sequence of shots varied. Such gestures of decentering and limitlessness hint at the uncontrollable vastness and variety of life, which the “apparatus” and technocratic society seek to regulate, in vain. Not unlike the “silent resistance of foolishness” in the artists’ videos and the “dark space” in their earlier photographs, Object as Friends stands

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Fig. 3.6  Exhibition view of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys—Objecten als Vrienden, Mu.ZEE Oostende, 2012. Copyright Mu.ZEE Oostende, photo: Steven Decroos

as a dialectical comment on a world engrossed in taxonomies, knowing-it-­ all, and clear lines of socio-cultural division. Photography is at once a tool associated with a technocratic, depressive rationality and a medium for rejecting such state through absurd, poetic dissonances. In a world diagnosed by the artists as depressed, de Gruyter and Thys explore both the dangerous and the ludicrous sides of photography—its affirmative and its world-shattering character.

References Anguelova, Katia, and Andrea Wiarda. 2009. An E-mail Interview with Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. Kaleidoscope Milan: Suitcase Illuminated 6. Unpaginated. Baer, Ulrich. 2002. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press. Blackshaw, Gemma, et al., eds. 2009. Madness and Modernity. London: University of London.

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Brecht, Bertolt. 1964a. The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre (1930). In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett, 33–42. London: Eyre Methuen. ———. 1964b. Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting (1957). In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett, 91–99. London: Eyre Methuen. Bryson, Norman. 1990. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion. de Gruyter, Jos, & Harald Thys. 2002. Antwerp: Middelheim Museum. ———. 2021. Dépression à Dortmund. Press release Micheline Szwajcer Gallery, Antwerp. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1982. Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Macula. Filipovic, Elena. 2010. No Reason to Live: Interview with Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. Kaleidoscope 8: 172–177. Flusser, Vilém. 1983. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books. Gilman, Sander L. 1982. Seeing the Insane. New  York: The University of Nebraska Press. Haq, Nav. 2013. Nav Haq in Conversation with Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys. http://ensembles.mhka.be/events/optimundus/assets. Accessed 10 February 2022. Harpin, Anna. 2018. Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness. New  York: Routledge. Hoet, Jan, ed. 2013. Middle Gate ‘13. Ghent: Borgerhoff & Lamberigts. Küng, Moritz. 2012. In the Shade. Abitare 521: 113. Männig, Maria. 2017. Hans Sedlmayrs Kunstgeschichte: Eine kritische Studie. Cologne, Weimar, & Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Meltzer, Eve. 2013. Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Metz, Christian. 1985. Photography and Fetish. October 34: 84–85. Mitchell, William J.T. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-­ photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Roelstraete, Dieter. 2009. The Teaches of the Speechless: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys’ Radical Silence. Mousse 3 (16): 18–20. ———. 2013. Disconnecting People: Art and Objecthood, Now and Then. In Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys: OPTIMUNDUS, ed. Nav Haq, 52–55. Berlin & Antwerp: Sternberg Press/M HKA. Rowell, Margit. 1997. Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sandblom, Philip. 2009. Creativity and Disease. London: Marion Boyars Publishers.

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Sedlmayr, Hans. 1948. Verlust der Mitte: Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit. Salzburg: Otto Mueller Verlag. ———. 2007. Art in Crisis: The Lost Center. New Jersey, NJ: Transaction. Shannon, Joshua. 2017. The Recording Machine: Art and Fact during the Cold War. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Spengler, Oswald. 1923. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Munich: C.H. Beck. Thys, Erik. 2014. Golem Garage. Antwerp: Objectif Exhibitions. ———. 2015. Phychogenocide: Psychiatrie, kunst en massamoord onder de nazi’s. Antwerp: EPO Press. Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

PART II

Psychosomatic Disruptions and Distortions

CHAPTER 4

Traces of Absence: the (Im)Possibility of Representing the Phantom Limb Laura Bertens

The rise of digital photography has been lamented as the undoing of the photograph as trace. The absolute mechanical truth supposedly provided by analogue photography can no longer be taken for granted. Given the sense of awe frequently associated with the “direct truth” of photography, it is no wonder that digitally manipulated photographs have often been viewed with suspicion, as a threat to the very essence of the photographic medium. Although critics have thoroughly explored the benefits of digital techniques, such as efficiency, reproducibility, and artistic innovation, many of them also focused on what is thought to have been lost. Digital photography has been described as “compromising” or “imperiling” the traditional medium, “depriving” it of its natural dependence on its subject matter (Iversen 2017, 34). The potential of these new techniques for creating truthful representations, on a par with analogue photographs, seems too easily dismissed, however. Digital photography is a highly diverse medium and its relationship to reality varies from outright deceit to innovative attempts at making us see past traditional constructions of reality. Lying is certainly possible,

L. Bertens (*) Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_4

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but so is the introduction of new forms of indexical signification that might allow a digitally manipulated photograph to function as trace in an expanded understanding of that concept, as will be discussed in this chapter. One part of reality which digital photography may help represent, in truthful and novel ways, is the human body. The truth of the body extends beyond its visual appearance, and representing the delicate balance between the body as object and as subject requires more than mimetic accuracy. Interaction between the photographer and the photographed subject further complicates the process. Whose truth is being represented? What does the body signify and how does it function as a sign? While a photograph of someone may provide a perfect likeness of the outward appearance of the body in that moment—a visual trace of the light reflected off its surface—there is no certainty that the image matches the sense of physical identity felt by the portrayed, as will be discussed in this chapter. Fascinated by the relationship between the body and its photographic likeness, the British visual artist Alexa Wright has devoted most of her artistic career to the challenge of representing the body—most notably the impaired or unconventional body—focusing on “the relationship between ‘the self’ and its physical manifestation, ‘the body’” (Wright 2003, 139). Since the 1990s she has experimented with digital media and photography, attempting to make visible the subjective experience of inhabiting one’s body. As a keen believer in the power of digital media, she argues: As well as providing the means of exploring and representing the body beyond its surface appearance, new technologies are perhaps instrumental in enabling the move towards a broader, phenomenological understanding of individual subjectivity. (2003, 140)

In this chapter, I will look at the photo series After Image (1997), in which the artist examines the psychosomatic dysphoria caused by the medical phenomenon of the phantom limb. When (part of) a limb is amputated, many patients will continue to “feel” the missing body part. This is a well-documented, but still poorly understood condition, which frequently involves sensations of pain in the missing limb and accompanying psychic disruptions. Apart from the physical and mental problems it causes, the phantom limb also presents us with ontological uncertainties about the body and its limits. How to understand and visually represent a body that is physically incomplete, but felt to be more than its material

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presence? How to make visible a memory of the body that is at the same time a reality of its subject? The phantom limb exists as an echo as well as a replacement of the removed body part. In such a case, the challenge of visually representing the body will involve finding ways of making this ambiguous state visible. As unmanipulated photography falls short with respect to this challenge, Wright has chosen to digitally alter photographs of the patients. In doing so, she has created composite portraits in which the phantom limbs were digitally reconstructed, using patient interviews and photographs of the remaining limbs. What is visualized in these photographs is not the visual body, but its proprioceptive truth, a distinction discussed in more detail below. The phantom limb is both a memory of the physical body and a reality of the patient’s identity, simultaneously absent and present. In this chapter I will explore Wright’s representation of this ambiguous state, using different perspectives on the photographic medium as trace. Drawing on Mary Ann Doane’s writing (2007), I distinguish between the index as deixis—the pointing finger drawing our attention—and the index as trace—the footprint as evidence of its owner’s earlier presence. In its indexical role as deixis, Wright’s photographs point to the phantom limb as present reality, one that is felt by the patient and made visible to us. As trace, however, the portraits are more complex, as I demonstrate by examining the different uses of the term, with a particular focus on the way it is used by Jens Ruchatz (2010) in his discussion of the relationship between photography and memory. I will argue that both the images and the phantom limbs can be understood as traces on different levels. Thinking through the different meanings of the digital photographs as index will help us understand the limb as echo and memory, as well as present reality. Wright’s photographs are thus shown to unite physical and mental states in the present and the past.

Representing the Invisible The earliest known description of the phantom limb is found in Ambroise Paré’s La manière de traicter les playes faictes tant par hacquebutes que par flèches (1552; in Finger and Hustwit 2003, 675). Although this may seem to be an old reference, it is surprisingly recent as a first description of a condition that must have been known to humans for as long as there have been survivors of amputations, either intentional or accidental ones. One explanation for its absence from earlier scientific and medical treatises is

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the fact that the phenomenon goes against all commonly held folk beliefs about the way the body works and is perceived (Halligan 2002, 255–256). For centuries, Western medical discourse relied on the assumption that sensations of touch, temperature, pain, and so on were generated in the limbs and sent to the brain, which passively received and registered them. Such a discourse had no room for the bizarre and counterintuitive reports of amputees, which seem to contradict this understanding of the body and suggest that sensations can actually originate in the brain itself. In fact, the phenomenon was so far beyond our rational understanding that up to the sixteenth century it required religious explanation. As shown by Douglas Price and Neil Twombly (1978), there are many accounts of miraculous restorations of lost limbs, which they argue to be metaphorical descriptions of the medical condition involved. Since Paré’s publication, the phenomenon of the phantom limb has slowly gained interest in the medical field, as reflected with some regularity through descriptions in studies by medical experts (Finger and Hustwit 2003). It was not until 1871, however, that the term “phantom limb” was coined by neurologist Silas W. Mitchell, which underscores the phenomenon’s uncomfortable role within the medical sciences. From case descriptions, patient interviews, and clinical studies we now have a clear sense of the symptoms and medical presentation, even if explanations are still not fully agreed upon (Halligan 2002; Giummarra et al. 2010; Lenggenhager et  al. 2014; Schott 2014). Phantom sensations occur after almost all amputations; they are most frequent with amputations of the limbs, but can also occur after removal of, for instance, the nose, tongue, or anus. Most of the patients who feel the presence of phantom limbs experience pain in the missing body part. The phantom limbs usually resemble the original limbs, although they sometimes appear to miss parts or to have become shrunken or extended. And while some patients can “move” their phantom limbs, in other cases the phantom limb remains fixed (Giummarra et al. 2010). Despite these consistent and convincing descriptions of the symptoms, the phenomenon is still often seen as pathological and bizarre. Despite new medical insights, the traditional beliefs surrounding the workings of the body are persistent and, as claimed by neuropsychologist Peter W. Halligan (2002, 256), “[t]he problem with these folk assumptions is that they do not provide for or predict ‘limbless perception.’” In addition, the phenomenon stands out from other forms of body dysphoria due to

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three characteristics, best summed up by psychologist Ronald Melzack (1992, 120): The most extraordinary feature of phantoms is their reality to the amputee … The phantom, in fact, may seem more substantial than an actual limb, particularly if it hurts. … The sense of reality is also strengthened by the wide range of sensations a phantom limb can have. Pressure, warmth, cold and many different kinds of pain are common … A final striking feature of phantoms, which reinforces the reality still further, is that they are experienced as a part of oneself. That is, patients perceive them as integral parts of the body. A phantom foot is described not only as real but as unquestionably belonging to the person. (Emphasis added)

It is these idiosyncratic features of the condition that cause it to be so strikingly at odds with what appears, to our eyes, to be the reality of the patient’s body. How can a limb which is so evidently absent appear so vividly present to the amputee? If visually representing the healthy, abled body is an artistic challenge, a truthful representation of the amputee’s body seems well-nigh impossible. The difficulty lies in the difference between the visual, material reality of the body and its proprioceptive truth. In 1823, the surgeon Charles Bell, who was also interested in phantom limbs, suggested the physiological existence of a sixth sense, called “proprioception,” in addition to the five well-known Aristotelian senses.1 Through proprioception we establish the position and movement of our body parts; it allows us to brush our teeth with our eyes closed, or to walk without constantly having to look at our feet. Unlike the traditional five senses, we are rarely conscious of this sixth sense, until it becomes disturbed, at which point it upsets our equilibrium (quite often literally) and can dramatically undermine our sense of balance and position, and, in the long run, potentially affect our mental health as well. It is a faulty sense of proprioception, then, that causes the amputee to perceive the phantom limb and its “wide range of sensations” (Melzack 1992, 120).

1  The term “proprioception” derives from the Latin propius, “one’s own,” and capere, “to grasp”; see also Finger and Hustwit (2003, 680).

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After Image The difference between proprioceptive and visual truth reflects the difference between the person as subject and as object. While the phantom limb is an absence to the observer, it is a reality to the patient. When photographing (or otherwise visually portraying) the patient, the artist is faced with the difficult problem of distinguishing between these two perspectives. As we will see below, Alexa Wright focuses precisely on this dilemma. Speaking about her work in general, she says: “Considering the portrait as a likeness of a particular person, it is interesting to examine the degree to which this likeness may represent an individual’s subjective experience, as well as their physical appearance” (2003, 140; emphasis added). The phenomenon of the phantom limb features as the perfect case study for such an examination. Not only does the artist need to distinguish between portraying the amputees as subject and as object; she also needs to find a way to translate their subjective experience, which is invisible by definition, into a visual medium. Although purely an artistic project, the photo series can be related to other, non-artistic attempts at representing phantom limbs. Illustrations of phantom limbs are often used to help patients and doctors in communicating about and treating the condition by allowing patients to clarify the unusual shapes, positions, and movements of the missing limbs (Fig. 4.1). Often, drawings and diagrams are therefore used in studies, to visualize both the limb itself and the various types of phantom limb pain (Schott 2014). These representations are commonly created by doctors or caretakers, based on verbal descriptions by the patients. In some studies, patients draw the limbs themselves, often as part of questionnaires. None of these depictions, however, show the patient as an individual; in general, only the affected part of the body is shown and schematic drawings of the human body are used as templates. Rather than portraits, these are medical drawings, in which the physiological body is foregrounded and individual identity is absent. In contrast, Wright’s portrait series After Image, to which I will now turn, is concerned with the personal reality and identity of the patients—described by the artist as “the physical expression of subjectivity” (Wright 2003, 140). Many of Wright’s works are collaborative in nature; over the course of her career, she has depicted people with various disabilities and medical conditions, basing her works on interviews with and participation by the

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Fig. 4.1  Diagram incorporating dotted outlines depicting triple phantom limbs induced by hypnosis in a patient who had undergone three amputations of the left lower limb. Reproduced from Schott (2014)

photographed subjects.2 Apart from representing the subjective reality of those depicted, the artist is also interested in the self-conscious experience of the audience, as she questions notions of physical normality and acceptance (Wright 2003, 139). The portrait series After Image follows this same approach and uses digital photography to represent the patients’ bodies. Working together with neurologist John Kew and neuropsychologist Peter Halligan, the artist interviewed and photographed eight people with amputations of (part of) a leg or arm. Of each, two to four photographs are included in the project. Each person is represented through an unmanipulated photo and one to three photos in which the phantom is digitally constructed, with or without a prosthesis attached. Examples of the series of photographs of three of the amputees are shown in Fig. 4.2. In addition to each set of images, Wright included parts of the interviews in which the portrayed subject described the history and condition of their phantom limb. These texts are prefaced by technical details, listing the date of amputation, the time passed since amputation, age and gender of

2  Artworks dealing explicitly with these issues are, for instance, I (1999), Skin (2000), and Face value (2001).

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Fig. 4.2  Three of the eight sets of photographs from Alexa Wright’s series After Image (1997), showing the complete photographic series of RD, JN, and JoN. All photographs and excerpts of the interviews can be found on the artist website (Wright 2020). Photographs courtesy of the artist

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the amputees, the cause of amputation, and the state of the limb prior to removal.3 Each photograph is marked by the initials of the amputee. One unmanipulated photograph is titled “Portrait,” while the manipulated photographs are numbered. These technical titles and captions make the photo series resemble medical dossiers, while, taken together, the eight sets of photographs seem to present a clinical study of the medical condition. However, the settings of the photographs, as well as the descriptions by the subjects themselves, actually remove them from the medical discourse again, presenting a highly personal and subjective documentation of the lives and identities of these eight people. They were each photographed in their own homes or gardens, casually dressed, looking confidently at the camera, as if to invite us into their daily lives. Apart from After Image, I managed to find only a few other artistic reflections on the phantom limb. Examples are the short animation film Phantom limb (2013), by Alex Grigg, and Frank Bidart’s poetic monologue “The arc” (1990). Both works are powerful representations of the emotional impact of amputation on the lives of the patient and their loved ones. Wright’s choice of digital photography, however, allows her to foreground the ambiguous ontological status of the amputee’s body, while at the same time exploring our conventional beliefs about the medium of photography. As she notes, “[b]oth the authenticity of the photographic image and the authenticity of the body image are questioned: which is the ‘true’ body; that which we see or that which is experienced?” (quoted in Irwin 2012, 73). In the following sections I will consider both instances of authenticity through the concept of the trace.

Ambiguous Traces Theorists of photography have a tendency to discuss the idiosyncratic nature of the medium in binary terms, such as: aesthetic expression versus realistic duplication (Bazin 1967), visual versus mechanical models (Snyder and Walsh Allen 1975), punctum versus studium (Barthes 1981), trace versus deixis (Doane 2007), externalization versus trace (Ruchatz 2010), or continuous versus discrete (Mitchell 1992). Occasionally we find a tri-­ partite set, such as in Rudolf Arnheim’s authenticity, correctness, and 3  The entire work can be found on the artist’s website (https://www.alexawright.com/ after-image).

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truth (1974). Without exception, the concepts put forward by these scholars are intended to help answer a fundamental question, as old as the medium of photography: what is the ontological relationship between the photograph and the reality in front of the camera? Underlying this debate is the complex notion of indexicality, which constitutes the core of the dilemma of photography’s perceived realism. The sibling of the icon and the symbol, the index was described by philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce (1960, 161–65) as the most “forceful” of the three types of signs. Unlike the other two, the index possesses a causal relationship with its referent, either because the index draws our attention to the referent (e.g., the word “this”) or because the index is a physical imprint or remnant of the referent (e.g., a footprint). In both situations, the index is to be understood, in its most basic function, as pointing to its object, making us aware of its existence, be it in the present or at some moment in the past. While Peirce explicitly described the two kinds of index, their difference is often lost in discussions on the topic. In an attempt to make their fundamental distinction explicit, Mary Ann Doane (2007, 136) has referred to the two as index as deixis (pointing) and index as trace (imprint). Her description is worth quoting: First, when the index is exemplified by the footprint or the photograph, it is a sign that can be described as a trace or imprint of its object. Something of the object leaves a legible residue through the medium of touch. The index as trace implies a material connection between sign and object as well as an insistent temporality—the reproducibility of a past moment. The trace does not evaporate in the moment of its production, but remains as the witness of an anteriority. … The index as deixis—the pointing finger, the “this” of language—does exhaust itself in the moment of its implementation and is ineluctably linked to presence. There is always a gap between sign and object, and touch here is only figurative.

Of these two readings of the concept, it is the index as trace that has provided photography with its unique aura. A photograph does not just point to the photographed scene; it is also a direct material consequence and resemblance of it. According to Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1987, 56), the indexical relationship is automatically iconic, and this compulsory indexical iconicity forms the basis for our belief that what we see in the photograph has to be real.

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Although photographs thus obtain their veracity as trace, this concept needs to be qualified. The confusing nature of the trace is tied up with the many and diverse metaphors used to explain the feeling of magic linked to photographs—from footprint, death mask, mummy, or relic, to fingerprints or hairs at a crime scene. The relationship between the photograph and that which has been photographed is thus often shrouded in layers of metaphorical poetry (Geimer 2007, 9–11). The different metaphors presume different relationships between signifier and signified; is the photograph a “part of” the photographed subject, as is the case of hairs left on the scene, or caused by it, such as the footprint? Are the two identical, as in the case of mummies? Our faith in the trace as absolute truth does not derive solely from an objective understanding of a mechanical process, but is largely determined by the implications of these various well-known and persistent metaphors. Beneath the one concept of the trace, we find different layers of belief. Arnheim (1974, 157) unravels some of these, when he prompts us to ask three questions when faced with a photograph: Is it authentic—untampered with? Is it correct—corresponding in its features, such as light and proportions, to what the camera “saw”? Is it true—as a statement not about what was in front of the camera but about the facts of that matter? Thinking about photographs in this way emphasizes the importance of construction and convention, not only in producing, but also in reading the image. It also makes room for an understanding of the photograph as deixis, rather than merely as iconic trace. Rather than being the truth, a photograph might point to it. In the case of Wright’s portraits, the function of photography is complicated both by the ambiguous state of the phantom limb and by the digital manipulation. In the light of these conceptual complexities, what is the relationship between Wright’s portraits and the bodily reality of her subjects? In the next section, Arnheim’s questions and Doane’s distinction between deixis and trace will help us shed light on this. Next, I will turn to Jens Ruchatz’ understanding of the trace, to introduce another perspective on the relationship between the phantom limb and its representations.

Traces of Existence At first sight, most of the photographs in Wright’s series look like mundane, conventional portraits (Fig.  4.2). Only after one notices missing body parts and (slight) deformities, the amputations of limbs and the

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digital manipulation of some of the photographs become clear. The photographs differ in the extent to which they reveal the body’s condition, even the seemingly straightforward “portraits.” While JoN Portrait does not show the amputation at all, in RD Portrait the absence of the right arm stands out immediately. And in JN Portrait the prosthesis can be recognized from the subtle difference in color between the hands. It is the presentation of each of the photo series as a whole which allows for the subtle blend of reality and manipulation, providing the viewer with the “full” story of the amputee’s body. It is perhaps telling that in the series in which the unmanipulated portraits seem unambiguous, either in emphasizing the amputation or in hiding it (notably RD and JoN), these photographs are included as last item. Reading from left to right, the observer is thus presented in each case with an ambiguous photograph first (RD1, JN portrait, JoN1). Each additional photograph adds to the complex understanding of the amputee’s body. In this way, when we arrive at JoN Portrait in JoN’s series, we are likely to assume—based on JoN1, JoN2, and JoN3—that the amputation is there, even if hidden from view. And conversely, after first seeing RD1 and RD2, we suspect that RD Portrait does not show us the entirety of this subject’s proprioceptive truth. Each of the photographs in a series thus presents us with a different representation of the same body, and taken together they tell the complicated story of the subject’s experience. In some of the images, digital alterations are visible; the right hand of the subject RD is not attached to the upper arm, JN’s wrist has shrunken to a mere rod connecting arm and hand, and in the series of JoN his lower leg turns out to be semi-transparent. When reading the interviews, it becomes evident which body parts were affected and why. Based on these descriptions, the reader can discern where the image was manipulated. When comparing the conventional portrait with the numbered manipulations, we do not question the elements that remain unchanged in both; there is no reason to suspect that anything other than the phantom limb was doctored. In fact, the seemingly bizarre appearance of the phantom limb strengthens the mundane, almost boring normality of the rest of the body and its suburban everyday settings. The indexical iconicity of the photographs therefore remains largely intact. For the most part, the photographs still function as traces, in Doane’s definition of the term. Upon closer inspection it is furthermore obvious that the phantom limbs were reconstructed using photographs of the other, remaining limb. Rather than digital creatio ex nihilo, the images

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are almost entirely the result of combining unmanipulated photographs of the same subject; they can be likened to double exposures in analogue photography. In the cases of RD and JoN in particular, nothing was added that did not already form part of the subject’s body. No foreign elements were introduced. The digitally visualized body is still entirely and essentially “self.” Even the added elements, created from photographs of the remaining limb, retain some indexical iconicity, even though the temporal and spatial integrity of the image is lost. This combination of unaltered photography and digital manipulation makes us reflect on the truthfulness of not only the image but also, more importantly, the visual appearance of the body itself. The manipulation of the images (in some portraits more visible than in others) may at first make us decide that the images are unrealistic, untruthful. But a minute’s reflection will perhaps cause us to reconsider and conclude that it is not the image that deceives us, but our perception when looking at the amputees. We are not seeing the full reality of their bodies and Wright’s series shows this by questioning our blind faith in the photograph conceived as Doane’s trace. Rather than being less truthful, the manipulated series of photographs turn out to be closer to the subjective reality of those portrayed than unmanipulated photography could ever be. We are helped in making this mental leap by our expectations of physical normality. The outward appearance of the amputees challenges our sense of reality. These bodies are unfamiliar and seem partial or deficient. Searching for the reassuringly familiar, our minds automatically want to complete the missing body parts. This is why a representation of the patients with their missing limbs digitally reconstructed seems to restore not only the self-image of the patients, but also the observers’ sense of normality and expectation. At first glance, we may in fact be inclined to believe the manipulated photo over the unmanipulated one. Wright herself notes this when discussing visitors’ reactions to the work (2003, 141): It is interesting that many people, on seeing the portrait showing Roger’s [RD’s] phantom hand … automatically disregard the gap between the phantom and the stump of the arm. Experience overrides the real, and the body is seen in its “normal” configuration.

In other words, we see what we expect to see, then quickly realize that the photographs are in part unauthentic and were digitally altered, but instead of leaping to an instant dismissal of their truth claim, we reconsider our

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own understanding of the portrayed bodies. In this rapid double take, we come to re-evaluate, consciously or unconsciously, our beliefs about the reality of these material bodies as well as the veracity of the photographs. The sets of portraits are complicated indices and it is here that Doane’s distinction between deixis and trace can help us come to grips with the represented truths. The manipulated photographs function as deixis, pointing not merely to the physical body of the amputee and its visual appearance, but also to its ontological dilemma. As trace, the images are more complex: as a result of the digital alterations, the photographs are no longer complete and instantaneous traces of the light reflected off the subjects’ bodies. Instead, they are compound signs, bringing together parts of the conventional photographic trace, with more complex traces of the amputee’s subjective reality. As traces of the individuals’ realities, they gain trustworthiness from the collaboration between photographer and photographed (as corroborated by the included interviews). The blend of unmanipulated photography of the visual body and digital elements visualizing the invisible phantom reflects the complex mismatch of these physical (and thus visible) bodies and their mental constructions—a mismatch caused by faulty proprioception. With the aid of Doane’s terminology, we can now turn to answering the questions posed by Arnheim. We have to conclude that the phantom limb creates a catch-22 when it comes to photographic representation. If an unaltered photograph of the amputee preserves the status of the image as trace, it does not do justice to the reality of the subject; while the photograph is authentic, it remains partially untrue as well. A manipulated photograph, on the other hand, largely invalidates the index as trace, but as deixis it more accurately points to the subject’s bodily reality. Although the image is no longer authentic, it has become true. An illustration of this is found in the interview with GN, who describes his perception of the phantom as follows: I will always be this; I will always have two arms, it’s just that one of them is missing. The real me is without the prosthesis. Its uncomfortable, it’s not me. It is surprising how one armed I look when I see photographs of myself. My self-image is two armed. (Wright 2020)

As Doane observes (2007, 136), the index as deixis is “ineluctably linked to presence,” and in the case of the existence of the phantom limb, this presence is as complex as its materiality. The phantom limb may be (too

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simplistically) understood to resemble a body part from the past and a representation might therefore seem to function merely as a trace of the amputated limb, “as the witness of an anteriority” (136). However, to the owner of the phantom limb, the body part is both missing and present, both an echo and a reality, and the photographic representation functions not (merely) as trace, always pointing to the past, but as deixis, showing a current truth. In the next section I will further explore the importance of memory in understanding the indexical nature of Wright’s photographs.

Traces of Memory The phantom is not only ambiguous in terms of its physical existence—as material versus immaterial and visible versus invisible—but also blurs the boundaries between past and present. Phenomenological theorist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2011, 79) wonders whether the phantom limb should be understood as “a memory, a wish, or a belief.” Although it exists as a contemporary part of the amputee’s body, at the same time it refers back to a limb no longer there. The phantom is both a memory of the physical body—an echo of a lost part—and a current reality of the patient’s identity. The interview with JoN illustrates the function of the phantom as memory of the lost limb: “This is the only remnant of my leg there is; despite the pain I don’t want it to go. I can imagine it disappearing, and I feel a bit fearful” (Wright 2020). Although described here as a “remnant,” the phantom is hardly ever an exact copy or memory of the earlier limb. As discussed above, its shape and motion can differ, subtly or quite dramatically. So how does the phantom relate to its “original”? And how do Wright’s visualizations of the phantom limb help clarify the temporal complexity of the phenomenon, as a memory of the past as well as a novel structure in the present? In his discussion of the photograph as aide-mémoire, Jens Ruchatz introduces two distinct functions: photography as externalization and as trace. The first “is the established and, one could say, literal notion of media as memory”; photography functions “to store information outside the human body that otherwise would have to be preserved neutrally or— more probably—forgotten” (2010, 367). The second function, as trace, may seem to refer back to the index discussed above, but the use of the term is subtly different. Although Ruchatz discusses the importance of photography’s indexical iconicity as a guarantee for truthfulness, the main

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significance of the photograph as trace is this: “When a photograph refers to the past not as its representation but as its product, it functions more as a reminder that triggers or guides remembering than as a memory in itself” (370; emphasis added). This use of the photograph is again indexical, but the guarantee of automatic iconicity is of lesser importance; the main purpose is to bring back memories of the event that is pointed to, if not necessarily iconically represented. While Doane’s use of the term “trace” pertained to the causal relationship between the sign and the very existence and exact appearance of the referent, Ruchatz places the emphasis on the relationship between the sign and memories of its referent. The causality of the index is still there, but the perspective has shifted. The referent of the photograph as trace is no longer the photographed event per se, but the memories surrounding this event. As such, the trace bears a confusing resemblance to the index as deixis (rather than index as trace), in its function as pointing finger. But while the index as deixis exists simultaneously with its referent, Ruchatz’ trace and the memories it points to are necessarily divided by time. Along with the categories of externalization and trace, Ruchatz introduces two types of observers of the photograph, whom he calls readers and users (2010, 372): Users, the proper addressees of any given set of private photos, know the context of what is visible on a photo either from personal experience or from conversations with relatives or friends. By contrast, readers cannot penetrate the surface of the photographic image, because they have no access to this private knowledge, and therefore try to make sense of it by identifying the social codes that are present.

It is as readers that we view the portraits by Wright. Except for those portrayed and their relatives and friends, the photographs hold no exact information beyond the conventional codes that allow us to interpret, for instance, the social class of the subjects or the fashions of the 1990s. We can ponder the status of the phantom limb and read the descriptions of its origin, but we have no memories of the former limb or the described accident. Those portrayed, however, are the intended users of the photographs and the images speak to them in wholly different ways. In addition to visualizing the phantoms as they are currently experienced, the photographs will also trigger memories of the amputated limb. Much like the phantom limb itself, the portrait serves a double function, pointing to

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both the present and the past. As trace in Doane’s sense of the word, the portrait visualizes the body in the present moment, presenting a true if partly invisible reality of the portrayed subject. As trace in Ruchatz’ use of the term, it functions as a trigger for memories of the lost body part, by making visible its echo or remnant. This double function thus mirrors the ambiguous nature of the phantom. The potential importance of such digitally altered portraits to their users can also be gleaned by comparing them to the mirror box—a device used for treating phantom limb pain. In this setup, a visual illusion of the missing limb is created by using a mirror which reflects the image of the other, intact limb. When looking in the mirror, the patient will see herself with both limbs and this can help restore mobility and regular positioning of the phantom, which in turn eases phantom pain. The brain, unable to correctly incorporate the new body schema, holds on to memories of the former self and only by visually restoring the body’s former appearance can the phantom sensations be controlled (Lenggenhager et  al. 2014, 225–226). In similar, though static ways, Wright’s manipulated portraits help restore a reassuring sense of self for their subjects, by recalling memories of their former appearance and merging them with the current realities of their bodies. As GN explains, his self-image is still two-armed and photographs showing only his one remaining arm do not reflect the mental image of his body. Wright’s manipulated photographs take away the jarring discrepancy between his self-image and the photographic representation of his body. Part of the persistent belief in the magic of photography relies on what Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen (1975, 149) have called the “visual model,” the idea that the output of the camera is an exact match for the vision of the human eye and therefore a direct reflection of absolute truth. Although they show this to be an obvious fiction, the aura of photographic truth lingers. It is this characteristic of the medium that lends the photo series by Wright their force: we are ready to believe the absolute truth of the photographed bodies, but we are misled and have to conclude that there is more to the human body than meets the eye. Rather than dismissing digital media as deceitful, Wright’s series make us question the possibility of photographically capturing, or even seeing, the lived reality of these bodies. Both the medium of analogue photography and our conventional knowledge of the human body are shown to rely (too) heavily on discursive (medical) convention and visual construction. The use and manipulation of a medium as reliable as photography allows the artist to

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confront us with the difficult task of locating the truth of the body. The “image” we form of our bodies is not just a retinal one, but also involves a compilation of signs, expectations, brain functions and cultural constructions, no complete trace of which can be captured in unmanipulated photography. Wright’s photo series might thus be said to go beyond the merely retinal by presenting us with a psychosomatic imagery of the amputee’s body. In her digitally reconstructed portraits, the artist has managed to trace not merely the phenomenologically incomplete, visual appearance of her subjects, but the proprioceptive reality of their bodies. The ambiguous state of the phantom limb, as perceptible and imperceptible, belonging to both the present and the past, has been “photographed.”

References Arnheim, Rudolf. 1974. On the Nature of Photography. Critical Inquiry 1 (1): 149–161. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Bazin, André. 1967. What is Cinema? Vol. 1 & 2. Trans. H.  Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 2007. The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity. Differences 18 (1): 128–152. Finger, Stanley, and Meredith P. Hustwit. 2003. Five Early Accounts of Phantom Limb in Context: Pare, Descartes, Lemos, Bell, and Mitchell. Neurosurgery 52 (3): 675–686. Geimer, Peter. 2007. Image as Trace: Speculations About an Undead Paradigm. Differences 18 (1): 7–28. Giummarra, Melita J., Nellie Georgiou-Karistianis, Michael E.R. Nicholls, et al. 2010. Corporeal Awareness and Proprioceptive Sense of the Phantom. British Journal of Psychology 101 (4): 791–808. Halligan, Peter W. 2002. Phantom Limbs: The Body in Mind. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 7 (3): 251–269. Irwin, Catherine. 2012. Phantasmatic Reconstructions: Visualizing Phantom Limbs in the Works of Alexa Wright and Frank Bidart. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 6 (1): 69–84. Iversen, Margaret. 2017. Photography, Trace, and Trauma. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lenggenhager, Bigna, Carolyn A.  Arnold, and Melita J.  Giummarra. 2014. Phantom Limbs: Pain, Embodiment, and Scientific Advances in Integrative Therapies. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 5 (2): 221–231. Melzack, Ronald. 1992. Phantom Limbs. Scientific American 266 (4): 120–126.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945/2011. Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-­ photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1960. Collected Papers, Vol. 2: Elements of Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Price, Douglas B., and Neil J. Twombly. 1978. The Phantom Limb Phenomenon. A Medical, Folkloric, and Historical Study. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Ruchatz, Jens. 2010. The Photograph as Externalization and Trace. In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning, and Sara B. Young, 367–378. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1987. L’image precaire: du dispositif photographique. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Schott, Geoff D. 2014. Revealing the Invisible: The Paradox of Picturing a Phantom Limb. Brain: A Journal of Neurology 137: 960–969. Snyder, Joel, and Neil Walsh Allen. 1975. Photography, Vision, and Representation. Critical Inquiry 2 (1): 143–169. Weir Mitchell, Silas. 1871. Phantom Limbs. Lippincott’s Magazine Popular Literature & Science 8: 563–569. Wright, Alexa. 2003. At the Edge of My-self. Digital Creativity 14 (3): 139–143. ———. 2020. Alexa Wright. https://www.alexawright.com/after-­image-­photos. Accessed 16 December 2021.

CHAPTER 5

“Let Me Die, or I’ll Perish”: Dissolution and Resurrection Through the Photographic Double Samuel Dylan Ewing

In their book History Beyond Trauma, the French psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière relate the story of a patient who cried out to them, “Let me die, or I’ll perish!” (2004, 117). The two analysts liken the phrase to a zen koan, a riddle whose aporia defies easy resolution. This contradiction at the site of language, where mental anguish blocks the effective articulation of symptomatic experience, is not without significance for the interpretation of psychosomatic image making. The challenge that experiences of psychosis pose to communication—what art historians might think of in terms of representational challenges—lay at the heart of Spanish photographer David Nebreda’s practice. Nebreda was born in Madrid, Spain in 1952 and was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia by doctors in 1990 (Nebreda 2000, 9). His photographs chronicle his terrifying explorations of this condition and are shown almost exclusively at the Léo Scheer Gallery in Paris and published in books by the gallery’s own imprint. His oeuvre, which consists of almost entirely

S. D. Ewing (*) Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_5

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self-portraits, is incredibly difficult to behold: self-mutilation, the maker’s excrement and urine, and his acute anorexia overwhelm the majority of his images. These difficulties should not, however, dissuade a careful consideration of the meanings contained within their contradictions and aporias. As theorist and literary critic Elaine Scarry notes in her study on the seemingly inexpressible nature of physical pain, “The human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence” (1985, 6). In the pages that follow, I argue that Nebreda’s project is one that deliberately courts the duality of Davoine and Gaudillière’s koan through his photographic staging of the dissolution and resurrection of what the artist calls his “photographic double.” In other words, it is only through the photographic exploration of his most intense psychosomatic symptoms that Nebreda can recapture any sense of his own selfhood. In order to fully illuminate this claim, I trace the intersection of two modes of exchange present in Nebreda’s work. The first is an exchange of photographic gazes between the camera and Nebreda, who exists as both the maker and sitter of his images. I draw on Roland Barthes’s analysis of the photographic pose articulated in Camera Lucida to help define the peculiar nature of Nebreda’s self-portraiture as it intersects with his symptomatic experiences of a divided self. The second exchange is a psychoanalytic one, which offers an indispensable perspective on these symptomatic experiences while underscoring their congruence with Barthes’s notes on the photographic pose. This congruence ultimately explains why photography constitutes the ideal medium for Nebreda’s project of dissolution and resurrection. Davoine and Gaudillière’s interventions into psychoanalytic theory, which posit an indelible link between psychosis and history, are instructive on this point. As the analysts claim: “The subject of madness … is trying to tie together the traumas of his individual history and those of history writ large” (2004, 36). In Nebreda’s case, I suggest that the art historian’s gaze is perhaps most useful in weaving together the threads that bind what Davoine and Gaudillière identify as an individual’s history to history writ large. For Nebreda’s project implies that it is only through the psychosomatic dissolution of certain iconographic bodies from the history of Christian art that his own subjective resurrection may occur.

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Staging the Photographic Double In the photograph La découverte du veritable sense du miroir. Il ne sait plus où il est et où est l’autre (Fig. 5.1), Nebreda presents himself in front of a dirty mirror, gently holding open the top of his shirt as he suspiciously examines his reflected image. The mirror’s surface, which takes up the entire frame of the photograph, is covered in smudges, flecks of dust and dried matter, and a long, arcing scratch that curves from the image’s upper right corner down into its lower half. The camera that produced the image remains oddly absent, transforming this self-portrait into something closer to a religious icon in its insistent, even confrontational, frontality. The mirror’s “true sense” referred to in the title speaks to the most pronounced of Nebreda’s psychotic symptoms: the complete separation he feels when confronted with his own embodied self, a separation made dramatically Fig. 5.1  David Nebreda, La découverte du veritable sense du miroir. Il ne sait plus où il est et où est l’autre, 1989–1990. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000

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present when viewing himself in front of a mirror. In an interview with art critic Catherine Millet, Nebreda stated that “I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror in more than ten years, and I have no desire to do so” (2001, 13). When Millet responds somewhat incredulously, “But we, spectators, sometimes see your reflection in the mirror,” Nebreda explains how he scrupulously avoids his reflected image while constructing his images (2001, 13). Nebreda achieves this using screens, obtuse viewing angles, and bounced and refracted images that allow him to produce his photographs without actually confronting his corporealized image, which he describes as a “stranger,” a different body that he no longer recognizes. Given these statements, one might assume that Nebreda undertakes the production of self-portraits in the mirror to give himself an objective mapping of his own body. However, the elaborate settings of his pictures and the repeated presentation of his punished body defy such an easy solution. Within the context of Nebreda’s photographic project, viewers should conceive of his image as an entity that is distinct from his corporeal and psychic self, an entity that plays a role other than that of an exact correspondence or copy to the photographer’s own body. Nebreda himself considers self and image as separate entities, clarifying that his photographs “are not about an attitude of sympathy or affinity but a real identification that allows [me] to establish a direct relationship between [myself] and the photographic other” (Nebreda 2000, 174). Roland Barthes develops an explanation of photographic gazes that is useful to consider alongside Nebreda’s photographs, for they provide an understanding of the disorienting effects the camera has on the sitter’s sense of self. Barthes dedicates a lengthy and moving passage in Camera Lucida to articulating his subjective experience of being photographed. He writes, “Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image” (Barthes 1981, 10). This transformation prompts a profound self-­ consciousness in Barthes as soon as he finds himself in front of the camera: “Since Photography is anything but subtle except in the hands of the very greatest portraitists, I don’t know how to work upon my skin from within” (1981, 11). His only recourse is to embrace what risks becoming an infinite regress of recognition, explaining: I lend myself to the social game, I pose, I know I am posing, I want you to know that I am posing, but (to square the circle) this additional message

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must in no way alter the precious essence of my individuality: what I am, apart from any effigy. (1981, 11–12)

For Barthes, this social game throws the supposed authenticity of the photographic portrait into question. Its ability reduced to recording poses, the photographic portrait holds a dubious relation to the what the subject commonly perceives as their “true” character. Nebreda’s statements at times echo those of Barthes, especially the latter’s exclamation that “the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity” (1981, 12). Despite these echoes, the nature of Nebreda’s symptoms—a breakdown of “self” and “other”—complicates Barthes’s analysis of the photographic pose. What does it mean to photograph an authentic self, to capture that “precious essence of individuality,” when it is precisely this that has been suppressed through the psychosomatic symptom? Further, Barthes’s interpretation of the photographic pose seems to imply that the photographer and the sitter are different individuals. What does it mean for a photographer who expresses an intense disidentification with his corporeal self to undertake a project of self-portraiture? When Nebreda photographs himself, he plays a symbolic role that is neither the photographic creator nor the photographic subject as constructed in Barthes’s interpretation. He is instead located somewhere between these two poles, in a liminal space of exploration. The photographs are still, as Barthes puts it, “the advent of [oneself] as other” (1981, 12), but they are no longer fraught with questions of authenticity or veracity. Literary and visual culture scholar David Houston Jones explains the liminal juncture that Nebreda occupies using a different set of terms. According to Jones, “Just as Nebreda is both subject and ‘author’ (of his pain as well as of the images), the body splits into a denotative ‘body of representation’ and a visceral ‘body of experience’” (2003, 182). This split marks one of many aporias embedded in Nebreda’s project, the purpose of which is to find a way of knitting the disjuncture back together in a holistic sense of self. The questions posed above find their visual equivalent in an untitled photograph similar to La découverte du veritable sense du miroir in the iconic frontality of Nebreda’s body viewed through the surface of the mirror. Nebreda stands shirtless, capturing his image from the torso up, with one arm bent and cradling a white towel splattered with the artist’s blood, the other uplifted in a gesture of supplication. Stray cuts and scratches appear across Nebreda’s chest and over his upturned palm, small rivulets

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of blood seeping onto his emaciated flesh as he stares blankly out of the surface of the dirty mirror. Aside from the marks of self-mutilation, the photograph distinguishes itself from La découverte in two ways. First, the mirror in which Nebreda presents himself to viewers does not fill the entirety of the photographic frame. Instead, viewers are able to see the mirror’s border, which rhymes with the border of the photographic frame. The image announces itself as a picture within a picture in a kind of reproductive self-consciousness. Secondly, the image includes text, possibly written in the artist’s own blood, across the upper margin of the mirror. “ESTERIL,” [Sterile] it reads. More than a reference to an inability to sexually reproduce, this caption more likely indicates the mirror’s inability to reproduce a true sense of self. Thus, Nebreda’s recourse to photography serves in part as a second-order picturing device with which to stage what he perceives as the reproductive sterility of the mirror.

Acknowledging the Symptomatic Gaze Psychoanalytic theory provides an ethic of viewing and interpretation in the face of Nebreda’s disquieting work, thus illuminating a second mode of exchange within his photographs. Drawing upon a mixture of Lacanian psychoanalysis and American war psychiatry, Davoine and Gaudillière describe psychotic symptoms such as the ones experienced by Nebreda as signs that “reveal the rupture of transmission along the fault lines of the social link” (2004, 6). Madness, according to the two analysts, is a system of communicative exchange that has ceased to function. This “rupture of transmission” makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for the subject experiencing psychosis to communicate with the outside world, to reposition themself within a shared social reality. On the nature of the analyst’s role (and by extension, that of the viewer), Davoine and Gaudillière write, “[The patient] is the PI, the principal investigator, of the research, on condition that we consider ourselves his research assistants and act as such” (2004, 24). Under this regime, the analyst-viewer assumes a co-authorial position in the inscription of meaning within attempts at communication under psychosomatic conditions. In other words, the analyst-viewer is a necessary component of Nebreda’s project of what Davoine and Gaudillière would call “construct[ing] an Other to whom to speak” (2004, 16). The viewer of Nebreda’s photographs thus serves as an integral nodal point in the economies of his project, standing at the receiving end of his photographic exchange.

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The violence and self-harm of Nebreda’s photographs make the role of interpretive research assistant a difficult one to assume. Assimilating his pictures into an aesthetic tradition that explores pain and suffering offers one method of taming their unruly content. Nebreda, however, disavows outright any allusions to the turn toward the body as a fragile and precarious vessel in certain strands of modernism. For example, when asked what he thinks of the Viennese Actionism, a small, mid-century avant-garde whose main participants forged a performative art of transgressive, bodily destruction, his response is direct: “I’m familiar with them, but they don’t interest me. This plastic and conscious use of their body does not interest me” (2001, 17). Instead, Nebreda’s chosen references lay in the Christian religious iconography of the Early Modern and Baroque periods. In her own meditation on images of violence and suffering, Susan Sontag draws on the thinking of Georges Bataille when commenting that “[Bataille states] that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation” (2003, 90). Bodily degradation and spiritual exaltation form two seemingly contradictory categories within which to place Nebreda’s photographs. Jones describes this problem of categorization in dialectical terms, explaining: Viewing [Nebreda’s photographs in] Autoportraits involves an endless shuttling between the body as an accretion of concrete visual signifiers and as the locus of atrocious suffering. In a sense, then, to view the body of Autoportraits is to view the “other” body: to focus on the suffering body is to divert attention from the body of signs, and vice versa. (2003, 182)

An art-historical gaze attuned to representation, materiality, and method helps resolve this dialectical aporia. The photograph Les pommes du Correggio establishes Nebreda’s parameters for the dissolution and resurrection of his photographic double by making a direct reference to Correggio’s famous, sixteenth-century painting currently held at the Museo del Prado, Noli me tangere. In the foreground of Nebreda’s photograph, he has arranged a small still life containing three offerings—possibly consisting of frankincense, myrrh, and gold—along with five rotten and over-ripened apples pierced with shards of broken mirror. The background contains two framed, rectangular elements. To the left is a mirror reflecting Nebreda’s face in a soft

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focus, his intense, almost fearful gaze directed to a reproduction of Correggio painting propped in the center of the photograph, rising above the still life on a small stanchion. Jones provides one interpretation of the still life when he argues that “[Les pommes du Correggio] seems to suggest that Nebreda’s via dolorosa ends in Christ-like sanctity, although the dilemma remains as to whether [his project] bears a message of transcendence, or whether the ‘reincarnation’ to which Nebreda refers is a rebirth within the constraints of the flesh” (2003, 185). What remains missing from Jones’s otherwise convincing reading of Nebreda’s image is precisely its photographic qualities: the unique representational staging of the self that photography allows when placed in collaboration with the mirror. Indeed, while photography seems to embalm and entomb its subjects— one might once again recall the words of Barthes, who proposes, “Death is the eidos of [the photographic portrait]” (1981, 15)—it simultaneously enacts the reproductive fecundity of making a photographic other. Thus, viewers must attune themselves not only to the particular subject matter of Correggio’s painting, a story of transcendent reincarnation, but to its reproductive capabilities as painting. For despite the naturalism of Correggio’s painting, its non-indexical relation to what it represents poses an insurmountable obstacle to Nebreda’s own project of transformation. Nebreda stages the importance of photography to his Christological narrative of dissolution and resurrection in Conversation sacrée (Fig. 5.2). The image depicts an ad-hoc altarpiece constructed from a mirrored medicine cabinet, the two doors of which appear partially opened to give viewers a glimpse of its contents. On the cabinet shelves, Nebreda arrays objects that, in his own personal iconography, recall the Passions of Christ: rotten and pierced apples, a knife and straight razor, and a belt, among other objects. While these and other elements of the photograph bolster Nebreda’s project with multiple levels of rich, symbolic significance, most important to the claims of this chapter are the images scrawled on the back of the cabinet’s mirrored surface in what could be either Nebreda’s own blood or excrement. A string, pulled taut into a triangular shape, draws attention to this central grouping. In the center, mostly obscured by a rough application of material, stands a camera on a tripod, a rare instance of the apparatus making a visible appearance in Nebreda’s work. Next to the camera stands Nebreda, his face also obscured by the application of bodily fluids, pointing to the word “sea” written across his chest. On the right, Nebreda has scrawled a grotesque face that floats next to the

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Fig. 5.2  David Nebreda, Conversation sacrée, 1987–1988. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000

camera’s reflection and above a second inset mirror, the word “sea” appears once more written across the surface. The most peculiar aspect of the image is this repeated textual supplement. “Sea” is the first-person subjunctive of the Spanish word “ser,” “to be.” The subjunctive mood is typically used in conjunction with an independent clause, and commonly denotes emotions, wishes, opinions, or doubts. I want to suggest that the word’s double placement within the image denotes what Nebreda sees as the possibilities inherent to the exchanges described throughout this chapter. If the photographic double would be dissolved as was Christ, then a renewed self yet-to-appear would also come into being, might fill the space of the empty mirror. Nebreda describes a mental state akin to the representational lesson found in Conversation sacrée when he explains, “The mind is divided into two realities, one that belongs to all of [my] previous life, the one that has been abandoned by the grace of the new birth, and the other belonging to the personality acquired after this rebirth” (2000, 175).

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I close this consideration of Nebreda’s psychosomatic imagery with a final example, one that is striking for the way it dispenses with the emphatic violence found in many of his photographs while offering a peculiar meditation on the painter’s gaze that contrasts with his fearful engagement with Correggio. In Les deux fils nés et les deux à naître, Nebreda constructs a photographic diptych within a single frame (Fig. 5.3). One half of the photograph contains a reproduction of Theodore Géricault’s painting, La folle monomane du jeu, one of his famous “portraits of the insane” completed near the end of his life, most likely as a commission from Etienne-­ Jean Georget, a former psychiatric intern at the Salpêtrière hospital and medical supervisor at a private asylum in Ivry (Boime 1991, 79). Alongside this reproduction sits Nebreda, wearing a loose-fitting nightshirt while cradling a small bundle of dried herbs and flowers in his arms. He tilts his head slightly forward in a similar downcast expression as Géricault’s sitter, inviting viewers to engage in a comparative, perhaps even typological, mode of viewing. Nebreda constructs this diptych in characteristic fashion

Fig. 5.3  David Nebreda, Les deux fils nés et les deux à naître, 1987–1988. From David Nebreda, Autoportraits, Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2000

by shooting into the surface of a mirror, which is marred by stains,

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scratches, and imperfections. The deep blackness that pervades the image’s background give the sense of a continuous mis-en-scène, as if Nebreda and Géricault’s compulsive gambler exist in the same space, seated one next to the other. It is crucial to understand that Nebreda’s decision to reference Géricault’s famous portrait does not stem solely from the fact that it depicts a subject who at the time was declared “insane” by the era’s institutions of control and surveillance. Rather, Nebreda identifies in these paintings a model of observational recognition commensurate with the recognition he hopes to elicit throughout his wider project, thus accounting, at least in part, for his distinct demeanor of calm in this photograph. Writing about Géricault’s “portraits of the insane,” Brendan Prendeville remarks upon the descriptive intensity of the paintings, arguing that it constitutes “an essential condition of Géricault’s realism, namely that his subjects are watched and are presented as being watched” (1995, 99–100). Prendeville continues by noting, “In so far as it denies reciprocity, the act of watching commands the appearance of its objects, as in the case of a psychiatrist observing the behavior of a patient” (1995, 100). In other words, the act of observation commands the appearance of the subject of observation and constitutes it as such. This is precisely the kind of inadvertent and compulsory relationship between viewing and posing described earlier by Barthes, in which the act of sitting in front of the camera automatically elicits the construction of a different body. While for Barthes, posing elicits the anxiety of inauthenticity, a disjunction between the known and the presented self, for Nebreda it is to be courted in so far as his project relies on it for the creation of a photographic double. In short, Nebreda is searching for the commanding, yet sympathetic, gaze of an Other who might assist in his project of recognition. Readers already familiar with Nebreda’s photographs will surely notice that I have deliberately avoided engaging with his most disquieting images, those in which his anorexia appears to have pushed his body to the edge of death or in which his performances of self-harm verge into unspeakable mutilation. To be sure, such images hold an indispensable place within Nebreda’s project, but my own observational fortitude is not strong enough for sustained engagement. I can briefly look, and acknowledge their maker, but must quickly turn away from such suffering. This speaks to perhaps the most challenging aporia of Nebreda’s photographic

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project, at least for the viewers of his work. As I have shown, the communicative purpose of Nebreda’s photographs is to herald a viewer who can attest to the dissolution and resurrection of his photographic double. Under Nebreda’s psychosomatic experience, this photographic double is distinct from the figure of himself that he perceives when looking into the mirror. The success of his project relies, in part, on our acknowledging this distinction, and coming to terms with the internal logic of its repeated staging. Tragically, acknowledging the distinction can never completely mask its obverse, uncomfortable truth: that the self and other in these photographs are indeed one and the same, and that viewers must participate in the presentation of Nebreda’s punishment in order to lend him some sense of salvation.

References Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Boime, Albert. 1991. Portraying Monomaniacs to Service the Alienist’s Monomania: Géricault and Georget. Oxford Art Journal 14: 79–91. Davoine, Françoise, and Jean-Max Gaudillière. 2004. History Beyond Trauma. New York: Other Press. Jones, David Houston. 2003. Sex, Sainthood and the Other Body: Writing Icons in Claude Louis-Combet and David Nebreda. French Cultural Studies 14: 178–191. Nebreda, David. 2000. Autoportraits. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer. ———. 2001. Sur David Nebreda. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer. Prendeville, Brendan. 1995. The Features of Insanity, as Seen by Géricault and by Büchner. Oxford Art Journal 18: 96–115. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New  York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

CHAPTER 6

Ghost Feelings and Distortion: Redefining Dis-Order Karen D. van Minnen

Writing and image-making are acts of storing information outside the body. Both are considered narratives and are therefore receptive to idiosyncratic forms of “reading” and socio-economic-political framing mechanisms. In this chapter, I claim space to posit my concerns regarding the relationship between visibility and mental disorder, focusing on performative gestures of imaging set within boundaries of socio-political discursive frames. Pivotal to my argument is Roland Barthes’s conception of integrated reject or Éponge, a Janus-like style figure described in How to Live Together, the manuscript from his lecture series at the Collège de France (2013). Taking from literature and guided by the figure of fantasy (phantasma), rather than political science or psychology, his lectures are a joint exploration into reveries of idiorrhythmic communities within fictional spaces, and specifically those social groups in which each subject lives according to his own rhythm (2013, 3–23). Barthes is intrigued by a zone he discerns that falls between two excessive forms. The first is a solitude, eremitism, a negative assimilative form: the (secular or nonsecular) coenobium. The

K. D. van Minnen (*) Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_6

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second a median, utopian, Edenic, idyllic form: idiorrhythmy (9). Notably, his investigations, undertaken together with his students, often pertain to situations involving a desire not to live or the impossibilities of living. The world today, he tells us, is filled with very different types of societies, but probably not one without its own paradoxical integrated reject figure (81). This chapter contextualizes Barthes’s notions within contemporary spaces of political imagery, involving both Susan Sontag’s tailored critique of societies’ abject relationship to broken bodies, her assessment of visual violence and photographic narrative, and Édouard Glissant’s plea for opacity. Guided by the above dialogues, I analyze the cultural construction of the observer through a close reading of two photographs. Both are related to the problematics of a “realist” perception of representation and difference. The first is a medical photographic portrait and part of the American Red Cross Collection (Library of Congress). It shows a masked disfigured soldier and was taken by an anonymous photographer during World War One. His mangled countenance is veiled by a hand-painted representational dissimulate, a prosthetic mask asserting normative features. My second reading is of an ambiguous pinhole self-portrait photograph by the American artist and philosopher Barbara Ess (1944–2021). The gesture of observing conjoins representations and sensations with language and culture. Sontag recognizes a problematic relation between representation in photography and social ousting at the discursive level (2002) and the image-level (2019), a concern to which I seek to link my argument in this chapter. For the acts of photography and framing relentlessly, if often inadvertently, appear to sustain a tradition of Othering. This is why I take issue with W.J.T. Mitchell’s view that images can in fact help to visualize internal bodily breakdowns, as discussed in Seeing Madness (2012), his acclaimed investigations into madness and insanity concerning cinematic images. I submit that visibility is hardly an advantage in this context. Specifically, I aim to illuminate how more ambiguous forms of visual narrative, such as the sublunary images by Barbara Ess, could offer solace through the absence of the mimetic by focusing on a more relational, perspectival notion of vision beyond static representation that, through its form, evokes comparative and compartmentalizing tendencies.

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Rhythms and Relations With fantasy as a theoretical reading strategy tool, Barthes invites his students to investigate solitude and the degree of contact necessary for individuals to exist and create—at their own pace—a community in which all bodies would follow their own rhuthmos or “idiorrhythm” (2013, 6–8). His philosophical move intended to avoid quotidian subjection of regulated life, one devoid of any true freedom of choice. Resuming the pre-­ Platonic meaning of the concept of rhythm, he opened new perspectives, via ethical, political reflection, within epistemological theory. Barthes notes that idiorrhythmic communities, historically, refer to the most ancient interpretation of rhythm; idiorrhythmy denotes a particular manner to make one’s life flow, as opposed to a regulated and imposed one. Contrary to Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, who concentrate, respectively, on rhythmic techniques of colonization of space and everyday life, and on dressage and discipline, Barthes explores the utopian side of rhythm or new forms of life opposing these rhythmic techniques. With the concept of rhythm, questions of movement and temporality emerge. He bases ethical and political theory on a conception of rhythm of life. Living-­ Together in idiorrhythmic ways implies an ethic (or a physics) for a distance between cohabiting subjects (72–75). The problem he posits is a formidable one. It is, without doubt, the fundamental problem of Living-­ Together—and, consequently, it is the vibrant core of his lecture course. Barthes’s spaces of relation seem akin to those of philosopher Édouard Glissant’s in Poetics of Relation (2010). The latter explains enduring suffering imposed by history on the Antillean people as a mitigating discursive space of unique interchange. From within the French-Caribbean realities, bodies articulate a self-determined representation of being. In the chapter entitled “For Opacity,” Glissant articulates the invaluable nature of the theory of difference, describing Opacity as a state of mind which protects the Diverse: the marginalized minoritarian groups (62). This diversity that exceeds categories of identifiable difference, or unquantifiable alterity, creates a space that allows bodies to struggle against reductive thought generated by perceived notions of superiority. To Glissant, the gesture of acknowledging difference itself is capable of reducing things to a Transparent (190). He tells us that when we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency: “In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity

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with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce” (189). Western-oriented bodies, through their focus on processes of “understanding” people and ideas, allow such gestures to clarify the apparent consensual requirements for transparency, a concept that makes a person fully intelligible and interpretable. This is, in his view, a brutality, as it destroys the opacity of the Other. Opacity, he summarizes, exposes those limitations within schemas of visibility, representation, and identity that prevent the formation of any honest understanding of multifarious perspectives of the world and its peoples. Accepting differences inherently upsets any sense of balance. Acknowledging the Other’s difference means relating it to one’s norm—a gesture that admits the Other into existence within one’s system creating the Other afresh. Glissant concludes that there should be an end to the very notion of a scale to displace all forms of reduction. Because the Opaque cannot be reduced, it is a guarantee for participation (191). From the confluence of idiorrhythmy and poetics of relation, I interrogate the cultural purpose behind the motivation of the sculptors Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood to craft prosthetic masks for World War One soldiers with facial deformities, in their Tin Nose Shop studio. Specifically, I question the wider status of these prosthetics as an apparent equivocal requisite. Even though masking as a gesture quasi-­ relates rearticulated bodies to a prevailing body norm, its presence will also affect the fate of those with “mere” invisible scars. The Western (patriarchal) System allowed society to perceive mind-mangled male victims as uncanny, feminine, and hysteric. An invisible enemy that haunts an undefined, liminal space within the mind. First, though, because my argument focuses on a portrait photograph of a masked soldier, I will briefly reflect on the act of taking photographs in reference to philosopher Vilém Flusser’s contemplation on such a performance.

The Frame, the Photograph, and the Trap One of the sixteen intentional movements analyzed by Flusser in his suasive work Gestures (2014) is the gesture of taking a photograph. In this essay, he unpacks why the gesture of photographing is an inherent philosophical movement. He explains that because of the invention of photography, which came from a need for a tool that allowed one to look objectively, it became possible to philosophize in the medium of both words and photographs. However, a switch occurred making us try to

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observe photography itself by looking photographically (74). This is because the intentional movement involved in photographing is, in fact, a gesture of seeing, engaging the maker in what ancient Greeks called “theoria” (action of viewing), which produces an image nominated “idea” that can be shared and discussed (76). Flusser frames photographing as an intentional gesture. Because a body holding the apparatus knows what they are doing, they are involved in a transitional movement, and here philosophy and photography share a distinct feature: they both pursue a specific position (78). The gesture of the contemplative photographer helps one to see a tension between intervening dialectics. It is a movement in search of a position. Revealing both an internal and external tension, the gesture drives the search forward. This gesture, in other words, involves a movement of doubt, and to observe the photographer’s gesture from this perspective is to watch unfolding methodical doubt: a philosophical gesture par excellence (79). From Flusser’s notion of doubt, we move to meet my first photograph, a medical portrait from 1918, ironically entitled Cavallier (side view) (Fig. 6.1). Disarticulated by trench war horror, photographic retouch techniques inspired the artisans of the Tin Nose Shop to deflect attention from soldiers’ countenance distortions. However, the mangled soldiers’ abstruse, fragility, and often-impeded speech provoked communities, oblivious to the Fig. 6.1  Anonymous photographer, Cavallier (side view). (France, 1918. https://www.loc. gov/item/2007676079/)

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implications of trauma, to translate this uncanny spectacle into a myriad of socio-autoimmune-like disabilities—and a concomitant obfuscation discourse of expulsive difference. Wandering into this puppet-like likeness, I wonder what the pre-trauma Self of the defaced soldier, reconditioned in the black gorge of the trenches, would have been like to know before his ego-shattering collision with destructive technology. His shredded countenance is one of the Les Gueules Cassées, or “broken faces,” a nomination appointed to hundreds of thousands of disfigured re-articulations. The—still understated—elegance of his juvenile features, shattered by merciless war-tools, exists as a phantom memory, concealed behind a metal prop, transforming each subject into a stern Thing—as elucidated by Bill Brown in “Thing Theory” (2001). Taking from Lacan, Brown depicts Thing as an “is and it is not,” existing in a non-phenomenal form. Thing hovers over the threshold between nameable and unnameable, figurable and unfigurable, identifiable and unidentifiable (5). The sculptors’ involvement in creating these facial interventions is an uncanny—if unintended—political attempt to return images of shattered bodies to normalcy, to submit the broken countenances of a failed technological fix back into modern, postwar civilian life. Questioning the work(ings) the mask-thing performs is in fact not about the thing itself, but addresses subject-object relations, emphasizing “how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects” (Brown 2001, 7). In the Tin Nose Shop, all is set to effect to make the prosthetic fit into a natural, heterogenic illusion of desired reality. This young body’s representation evokes vicarious shame. The photographer’s lens in focus forces the spectator to follow its guide in creating a subject from the underlying void presented. The oddness of his countenance transfixes, particularly the prelingual stare, which inadvertently reduces the soldier to a pre-human state (Berger 2009, 252–261)—a gesture inherent to Othering. Somatic and mentally dis-ordered bodies, be it out of fear or ignorance, sustain grim consequences of this insight. Returning to his above-discussed essay, Flusser points our attention to the function of the body model (as they sit in a chair). The observed situation is fixed (still). The man with the apparatus moves within it. However, by turning our attention to the model, conversely, the situation slides. The man on his chair becomes the fixed element in a changing situation. Flusser suggests this phenomenon affirms the Copernican revolution and

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is in fact the result of a change of viewpoint, rather than a “truer” vision than the one provided by the Ptolemaic system. The actor, the man with the apparatus, does not intentionally move to find the best standpoint from which to photograph a fixed referent. His movements are guided by a need to look for the ultimate position that fits his intention to fix a changing situation (75). Flusser identifies a transitional, interlocutional space, tracing a ground for consensus or intersubjective recognition where we can encounter the man with the apparatus on this basis. In this space we do not perceive the situation “better”; rather, we see it inter-­subjectively, and we see ourselves inter-subjectively (76). Translating this line of thought to the image of our masked soldier, we cannot but conclude that the intentionality of its maker, by creating a mundane, sane-looking stereotype, is to produce a Thing of propaganda. The soldier’s appearance is captured by a notion of “fixity,” crucial in forming stereotypes. The stereotype creates an “identity” that stems as much from mastery and pleasure as it does from anxiety and defense of the dominant, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory beliefs in its recognition of difference and the disavowal of it. The prosthetic also conveniently traps the disabled mind within the mangled body. Unable to match presented visible and psychological atrocities with the sleek promise of heroism, polite eyes turned away from the bio-technological mesh. Societies’ exposure to their soldiers’ bare disfigurements swayed absolute belief in the liberating qualities of progressive politicized technology now known as the technocratic fix. A Foucauldian trap. Foucault’s influential analysis of confinement, ranging from institutionalized compartmentalization of madness and criminality to sexuality and reproduction, is contiguous with historical considerations regarding entrapment, a space defined by temporal experience limitations in clear spaces of visibility. Further reflections on socio-political usage of panopticon affirm “visibility is a trap” (Foucault and Sheridan 2020, 200). The rupture he poses between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries centers on physiology and understanding how knowledge is conditioned by a conjoined physical and anatomical functioning of the body—in particular the eyes—thus signaling new methods of power (Foucault 2013). And so, the actual double-fixed image—one tangible, one symbolic— of the disfigured soldier, to repair a technocratic loss of face, is tooled to become a special kind of pariah within concepts of heroism: enter the Barthian integrated reject. Molded by a spectator society into the required

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representation of decency, these men are convicted to a wretched life of liminal existence, wandering silently on the fray of societies skirts looking in. From this unique outsider position, echoing Haraway’s Cyborg, our masked soldiers see “from both perspectives at once” (2018, 15): a grim Janus position and not pre-, but Post-Human in the most literal sense. However, these quasi “transmuted” citizens remain a mere terrific entity, a sociological patch existing in a hopeless version of this state beyond being human. Many World War One soldiers committed suicide, their bodies laid to rest, masks set in place by confused family members. Today, the necessity to revolt against abject differentiates remains as urgent as ever. The gesture of masking the maimed soldier is a metaphor for the double dynamics of reintegration as re-enabling, while concomitantly labeling them disabled forever. A position that still resonates, affecting countless incapacitated bodies who struggle to return to their workspaces after surviving a disarticulation of mind and/or body. Visibility here is as Foucauldian precarity. The stigma (image) of the victim-image forms an inadvertent threat to crafted, efficiency-based homeostasis of “healthy” office cultures. It is an attitude that reveals abject aspects of Western sentiment regarding perceptions of psychosomatic disabled bodies in general. In Illness as Metaphor (2002), Susan Sontag illuminates how the visibility of both somatic and psychological fragility provokes linguistic metaphors, positing the dangers of their transmutations by accentuating the gamut of their resonance into both political and commercial imagery as forms of propaganda. Her voice is clear when calling out Western society for its historical perception of cancer as ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses, and even clearer when naming those who imply “it” to be a mental dis-ease and—in part—self-imposed (8). The dis-eased body creates unease in the (healthy) spectator. Equating her notion with the premise of this chapter, it becomes apparent that through metaphoric language, Western societies denote all dis-abled bodies inept, as well as any dis-order a norm deviation. People from contemporary-affected communities refute this stigma, countering it with the portmanteau term Neurodiversity (Singer 2017). They challenge prevailing views on neurodevelopmental disorders as inherently pathological by adopting a social orientated model of disability that advocates social barriers as the main contributing factor to branding bodies disabled (Chapman 2019).

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Disarticulation, Dis-order, and the Integrated Reject Bodies considered disabled or deformed often elicit strong affective reactions. They can shock, evoke disgust or sympathy, inject bias (even wonder), and remain fixated in mind-galleries. Portraying “deviant” bodies inherently evokes categorization, for, as Susan Sontag observes in Regarding the Pain of Others (2019), photographs are similar to a quotation, or a maxim or proverb, for each of us can mentally stock innumerable images, subject to instant recall (20). So, any visible fleshy deviation from normalcy might be registered and inadvertently labeled either kin or outsider by spectators. Obtuse mental deviations, however, remain obscure, unless situated within space and time structures where the evaluation of observed conduct defines classification. In her ground-breaking research into the veiled problematics of rape, domestic abuse, and war victims, published as Trauma and Recovery (1992), psychiatrist Judith Herman sets out her argument affirming the problematics of truth in traumatized bodies by introducing the essentiality of imaging in narratives for survival. She explains why emotional, contradictory, and fragmented stories of atrocity survivors undermine their credibility because they are unspeakable (Herman 2015 [1992], 175–196). So, although truth recognition should precede recovery, victims remain silent, causing these traumatic event narratives to surface as a discursive image: a symptom (1). Said manifestations are too often misunderstood as a mental dis-order, surrendering these bodies to the (often) confusing realm of legal binds. Isolated disabled bodies are—discursively—placed outside the socioeconomic landscape by aggregates of individuals (Campbell 1958). It is a form of moral judgment assigned to specific behavior considered deviant, thus challenging a group’s preferred perception of cultural homeostasis. It is precisely this social distance that creates an uncanny liminal or “crossing over” space, a transient space dictating a psychological state of being (Gennep et al. 2019). Characterized by temporality, ambiguity, disorientation, its meaning expands to describe unstable political, social, or cultural situations, alluring unstable properties often adopted within visual culture as a technique to depict “insanity” eliciting a Freudian Uncanny lack of ease. The United Nations attributed the primary causes of a disabled person’s inability to socially interact to lack of opportunities, lack of

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accessibility, lack of services, poverty, or discrimination (United Nations 2019). These aspects appeal to those who advocate disability rights (Wendell 1996, 14), as a failure to recognize that standards of structure, function, and ability are socially relative and could be dangerous to impaired bodies. However, in neoliberal landscapes, an identified deviated body is liable to formal diagnoses and officious labeling: a fixation occurs. The pathological aberrant is framed via the manual for assessing mental disorders: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2017). The DSM-V manual transmutes apparent deviant minds via weighed phrasing.1 Here, it is not static representation, as in the above-discussed soldier’s portrait, but medicalization that leads to categorization. In discourses of philosophy of psychiatry, one of the central issues revolves around the question of whether a diagnosis of mental disorders should rely on natural facts or social norms (Murphy 2015). This is a question with significant social and psychological consequences, due to the web of underlying socioeconomic political and legislative reasoning for those bodies subjected to either classification. Within the context of the DSM-V model, a mental disorder is defined as a syndrome characterized by clinically serious disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior reflecting dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. It is further refined by stating that mental disorders are associated with significant distress or disability in social and occupational activities, an occasional exception permitted. Thus, diagnosed bodies are fated to live a labeled life within an unforgiving neoliberal system of perfection and efficiency. Enchanted by the Foucauldian notion of technologies of the self, governmentality promotes their exclusion mechanisms as a form of inclusion, making visibility an additional burden for those living with mental disorders and connecting personal failure within this system to wellness programs for the burnout bodies it produces. It is an abject technology of responsibilization, promoting healthism, normalization, and self-esteem. Consequently, disarticulated bodies are, in both a legal and a cultural sense, indelibly marked a peculiar type of outcast—not a full social leper, more a quasi-pariah, born from a disadvantageous system. A body that (still) remains “a part connected to the whole” by function. And once 1  In Dimensions of Folk Psychiatry (2005), psychologist Nick Haslam argues that the DSM-V wrongly pathologizes many normal psychological variations (Kutchins and Kirk 2003), thus inflating the estimated prevalence of disorder in the community (Horwitz 2020).

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again, Barthes’s remarkable cultural silhouette, the integrated reject, emerges as a unique consequence of the way society feels discarded members must somehow remain articulated within a locality as scapegoats. Barthes propounds his docked figure as a requirement, crucial even to all communities as saying that all societies jealously guard their rejects and prevent them from leaving (82), rendering his body-outcast as a shadow living on a communal boundary. However, the modern integrated reject, just as their literary twin, still moves within the safety of the societal frame to which he is referred. Neoliberal Darwinism has been rearticulating the entire scope of idiosyncratic bodies by portraying them as market distortions: in-valid (Sontag 2002). This has featured as a prerequisite to the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, where ultimate positive subjects—those moral intimate economic things—articulate as post-human heroes all caught up in “good life fantasies,” a cultural concept interrogated by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism (2012). Berlant’s analysis revolves around the premise that bodies stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies, regardless of the abundance of evidence that they cause instability and fragility. Fantasies, much akin to Barthes’s reveries, help people create value needed to uphold faith in an arithmetic world where all gestures are subjected to surrender to those who perform the process of calculating their total value until the fantasy frays and is replaced by depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mash. As Berlant discerns, a Sisyphean pursuit of the good life has higher stakes. Its amalgam of fantasy and futility is something the Western world processes as experience before rationalizing it in thought (2) These feelings represent a perpetual bodily response to a world many cannot keep abreast. The divergent of depressed bodies is a cumbersome, a slow body, unable to run with the technocrats. To where will the language of thinking the all-encompassing incoherent mash of frayed fantasies lead? Ivan Illich opens a window to that question in his analysis of the concept of Medical Nemesis2 (1974), unfolding why most contemporary manufactured misery is the corollary of pursuits designed to protect the plebeian in their struggle with the harshness of the environment and 2  “Nemesis” originally meant damnation for precipitous exploitation of privilege. Culture defines the rules concerning the employ of their myth (rituals, taboos, and ethical standards required to cope with life’s fragility). Incapable of articulating an alternative, bodies resign to their fate.

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against elite instigated and malicious injustices. These same tools now engender pain, disability, and death through nonintentional engineered harassment. Prevailing ailments, helplessness, and injustice have become secondary effects of progress-driven schemes. Illich concludes by noting that because they have become unnecessary, contemporary pain and trauma have become unbearable. Deemed unnecessary, this type of dis-­ order (Sontag 2002) detracts self-proclaimed winners from feeling empathy for those who fall prey to its indifference. Illich’s voice echoes through the premise of my chapter. From the retouched representation of the disarticulated soldier, we finally move to my second reading: the cryptic photograph Untitled (2000) by artist and philosopher Barbara Ess, identified as a self-portrait (Fig. 6.2). Other than in the soldier’s portrait the gesture of photographing here is less intentional. Colorless audacious ambiguity characterizes this haunting image, reproduced on the cover of her photobook, entitled I Am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess (2001). This self-portrait invites the spectator to involve in its narrative. A curly haired figure stands in the circular penumbra of a cloud-rushed sky over a sunlit field of grass. These elements echo the wave of her hair and dress pattern in a wondrous dynamic, entangled image, generated by the one-point perspective on the highlighted horizon at the center. The fluidity within the mingle of body, landscape, hair, and clouds intoxicates; she glides from the light into the opaque secrets of a much darker area in the lower-left corner. Hand at mouth, a single digit presses against the teeth. The scene transmutes to uncanny once connoted as a surreptitious gaze through the eye of a mask. The photographer captured this haunting mirage without any lens intervention, pre-designed message, or code. Readings, therefore, hinge on chance relying on knowledge related to technical aesthetics and affect. To create this effect, the operator, Barbara Ess, used a dis-abled camera: a pinhole camera. This is a low-tech apparatus, capturing natural light effects without the manipulation of a lens. Paradoxically, the element of chance makes it a thoughtful form of photography as it does not hinge on any kind of lens manipulation; the exposure times are lengthy. The light entering this type of camera often gives a mysterious glow to the photographed reality mystifying the spectrum. All motion is either distorted, blurred, or disappears completely, distilling action (temporality) to the slow of the natural actual on the edge of a noir hyperbole, removed from the speed of technocratic-driven time. It is, therefore, able to capture the suggestion of

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Fig. 6.2  Barbara Ess, Untitled (2000) (Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains, New York)

the sedate aura of a de-pressed body. A lagging body unable to run with the technocrats. Pinhole demands the spectator to slow down and take time to observe. Metaphorically, this image is as if a part of someone is staying in one place while the other part is walking away. The motion of the blur mimics the widening abyss between the two of them. The gesture of taking a pinhole photo is the act of allowing an invasion of something unexpected into a scene that is directed by the apparatus, setting, and time itself. The photographer, by taking on a humble role (positioning the camera), allows for an aleatory re-framing of perspectives. The resulting images are ghostly in mindful, mingled, and distorted ways. Their opaque signification breathes a sense of embodied belonging within the whole of the social tapestry presented. As Glissant observes, opacities

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can both run parallel and converge weaving fabrics. To fundamentally understand this principle, “one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components” (190). He calls to give up this endless need to decipher the essence of these natures. Ess’s pinhole images offer such spaces by inviting the spectator to interact with what she calls “ambiguous perceptual boundaries: between people, between the self and the not-self, between in here and out there” (Ess 1). Focused photographs tend to isolate bodies from their environment thus individualizing them. However, Ess’s notion of identity is more fluid. Her pinhole images as published in I Am Not This Body question the concept of “being individual” as such. In doing so, Ess questions mental disorder as an individual trait or property and offers a more situational view on the constant negotiation of order and disorder that is universally human. Aspiring to reevaluate the often-biased representations of psycho-somatic experiences, Ess’s hazy representations depict moments of disruption between the orderly and the disorderly mind. She thematises the fragility of living: anybody can succumb to feelings of imbalance of which the severity and ephemerality depend on an array of internal and external factors. Her works are therefore inherently inclusive. Poetic by nature, the evocative images invite the spectator to interpenetrate and instigate ideas regarding idiosyncratic ways of being within our shared spaces. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times (Mckenna 1991), Ess says her art emerges from a mesh of ambivalence and confusion, mirroring her mind, which, she feels, operates better within narrowed means—hence her attraction to pinhole photography. Lack of intention in creating these enthralling spaces is what allows the spectator to intervene. Ess’s images, born from the horn of fluid art identities, are exhibited within and outside the white cube of weighed expectations, raffled hems that may or may not turn ambivalent thingness into a (commercial) product. Her work engenders notions of uselessness also manifest in her early 1980s art-scene band endeavors, most notably Y Pants. As the artist Kiki Smith once noted regarding this band: “The lyrics are ironic without being callous, the voices are sultry, the music is repetitive and trance-like … [with] a sense of urgency-like something being driven out” (Wing 2021). Just as her conceptual side of pinhole images relies on the distortive qualities of the make-shift camera, Ess seems to rely on distortion in music to create liminality. In her mind, she is uncertain if an essential reality is possible for bodies to get a grip on, realizing she does not experience life primarily in

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terms of the physical world. Ess feels her emotions and memories are paramount in shaping her experience as a human, stating she knows “there’s a me that’s more solid than this body I move through the world in” (Mckenna 1991). Through her gesture of use in pinhole photography, Barbara Ess teaches me what the absence of the lens means. Because there is no predetermined focus, no figure-ground, there is no subject. Her work invites the spectator to undergo affect from the subsiding sense of distance, a consequential movement separating the observer from their learned expectation of optical experience. This lack of focus flattens the visual field, eliminating aspects of life interfering with our well-being, which are too readily confused with historic labels of “fear of the unknown,” as defined in the DSM-V.  I believe paths into alternative views on common rhythms of living may emerge from connecting with these liminal spaces. Unbalancing affect from exposure is also a growing object of concern within the scope of the social-media debate. In his documentary The Social Dilemma (Harris 2020), technology ethicist Tristan Harris stresses that too many young bodies today suffer from an array of psychosomatic disorders inflicted by excessive, addictive exposure to endless waves of filtered images of faces and bodies, generated and distributed by social-media platforms, evoking a generation of youths who mask themselves for social acceptance. Streams of market-related images depict exhausting perpetual variations in unattainable beauty and identity norms, but nevertheless demand one to “cheerfully” obligate to the power of their will by creating a need. The Invisible Hand of the market requires bodies to veil misfortune with positivism, in order to accept one’s being as a state beyond being human, which manifests as a precarious state of post-human being— a peculiar type of pariah, a Barthian integrated reject or Sponge, an accepted expelled body, paradoxically acting as a social linchpin. In the soldier’s portrait, the disarticulated service body is fixated and framed in a medical-political grasp. A double freeze within a single frame, his effigy represents the opposite of fluid being. The rearticulated soldier figure is the epitome of unconditional faith in technocratic solutions. His image reflects traces of a Foucauldian fear, reminding me how through a political understanding of body functions the human subject is itself at stake, as it becomes compatible with emerging arrangements of power in its function as a worker, soldier, or mental patient. The act of seeing, when related to measurability through the static of photography, has a

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homogenizing function because the act itself renders the perceiver capable of self-deceptive forms of rationalization. In contrast, the gesture of using a quasi dis-abled (lensless) apparatus actually enables Ess to create fluid, abstruse landscapes from which she invites to gaze and ponder. To me, the unbalancing quality of her non-­ representations gives voice to the weave of terrific angst within the Western social, political, and temporal. In Ess’s image, the absence of an established source of light joined with the serge of discombobulating liquefying light rays, and together with the evanished sense of distance these separate the spectator from an instant, unitary static optical experience. Instead, however, the pinhole image offers the spectator an inescapable temporality built-up of varying speeds of living and reminiscent of Barthian idiorrhythmic forms of living together. One based on ethics, physics, or a distance between cohabiting subjects. These transcending spaces abandon the representational comparative fix, evoking hope toward a more accepting notion of what it means to be fragile, fluid, and ambiguous—allowing bodies to define their own pace within defined spaces of living. Somatic and/or mental dis-abled bodies are strands of threads within the tapestry of divergent bodies, not a divisive issue or a threat to a new stability in the fragile weave of social homeostasis. The ethic stitch of shared responsibility and the will to form responsible inclusive relationships need to be established or picked up in the societal weave to initiate social projects that respect divergent social safety, well-being, and self-­ determination. Space within the liminal is irrefutably connected to a difference in time perception: the slow of dis-order versus the speed of digitized living time. Fixed frame representations, through their current digital evolution via social-media platforms, are abject carnival mirrors in the way they reflect a normalization of unrealizable and undesirable perfection. In closing, I echo Édouard Glissant’s hope of creating a world from which notions of norm are eliminated. A space that may serve as our inspiration to approach realities of our time and place, by understanding it is impossible to reduce anyone, no matter who, to a truth he would not have generated on his own (2010, 194). Opacity, as a means of salvation from barbaric stigmas distributed by visibility.

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References American Psychiatric Association. 2017. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association. Barthes, Roland. 2013. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. New York: Columbia University Press. Berger, John. 2009. Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin. Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2012. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown, Bill. 2001. Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Campbell, Donald T. 1958. Common Fate, Similarity, and Other Indices of the Status of Aggregates of Persons as Social Entities. Behavioral Science 3 (1): 14–25. Chapman, Robert. 2019. Neurodiversity Theory and Its Discontents: Autism, Schizophrenia, and the Social Model of Disability. In The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry, 371–387. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ess, Barbara, and Michael Cunningham. 2001. I Am Not This Body. The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess. New York: Aperture. Flusser, Vilém. 2014. Gestures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 2013. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Random House. Foucault, Michel, and Alan Sheridan. 2020. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. van Gennep, Arnold, Monika B.  Vizedom, Gabrielle L.  Caffee, and David I. Kertzer. 2019. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Glissant, Édouard, and Betsy Wing. 2010. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2018. Cyborg Manifesto. Victoria, BC: Camas Books. Harris, Tristan. 2020. Netflix. The Social Dilemma. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uaaC57tcci0. Haslam, N. 2005. Dimensions of Folk Psychiatry. Review of General Psychology: Journal of Division 1, of the American Psychological Association 9 (1): 35–47. Herman, Judith Lewis. (1992) 2015. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Horwitz, Allan V. (2002) 2020. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Illich, Ivan. (1974) 2013. Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health. London: M. Boyars. Kutchins, Herb, and Stuart A. Kirk. 2003. Making Us Crazy: DSM: The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders. New York: Free Press M. Boyars. Mckenna, Kristine. 1991. ART: Shadow Land: With a Pinhole Camera, Barbara Ess Conjures Up a Hallucinatory World Where Everyday Images Become Eerily Seductive. Accessed 27 November 2021. https://www.latimes.com/ archives/la-­xpm-­1991-­11-­10-­ca-­2023-­story.html.

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Mitchell, W.J.T. 2012. Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media and Visual Culture. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Murphy, Dominic. 2015. Philosophy of Psychiatry. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), ed. E.N.  Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2020/entries/psychiatry/. Singer, Judy. 2017. Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea. Lexington, Kentucky: [no name publisher]. Sontag, Susan. 2002. Illness as Metaphor / AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin. ———. (2003) 2019. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. United Nations. 2019. Disability and Development Report : Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals by for and with Persons with Disabilities : 2018. New York: United Nations. Wendell, Susan. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge. Wing, Water. 2021. Y Pants. Accessed 1 November 2021. https://lightintheattic. net/releases/2730-­y-­pants.

PART III

Traversing Hysteria and Bipolar Disorder

CHAPTER 7

Somatic Signals: Nicole Jolicoeur’s Aura Hysterica Paul Grace

Hysteria as a disorder, or as a notion of a disorder, dramatically stages the relationship between the psychic and the somatic. It is also the scene of a conflict which illuminates the status of representation as a potentially coercive force. In the earliest photographs of hysteria, the traumatic roots of the condition are buried by representation even as they are demonstrated. We now know that women classified as hysterics were frequently bearers of traumas that they were unable consciously to represent to themselves. Instead, their trauma remained psychically buried, and their suffering was manifested instead in “hysterical” symptoms. The feminist aesthetic theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock (2013, 25) draws attention to a related underlying trauma generated by the process of identification itself. She describes the hysteric body as “a body in trouble with language as the offered terms of being sexed and gendered.” Hysteria is both a product of the designation of identity by an alien authority and a response to acts upon the body committed in the name of this designation. In nineteenth-century Paris, at the Salpêtrière hospital, the categorization, display, and treatment of symptoms were prioritized over the search

P. Grace (*) North West of England, Blackburn, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_7

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for a cause; buried traumatic experience was institutionally buried for a second time under the spectacular representation of its symptoms. The most significant archive of this is the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (Bourneville and Regnard 1878). The process of representation at Salpêtrière raises wider questions about the means by which we might gain meaningful access to the traumatic realities of others, when representation itself so frequently subsumes these realities under the projections of representing force. Traumatic phenomena alert us to deficiencies in existing representational processes and form the basis of a demand for alternative processes that acknowledge the trauma, and are themselves shaped by it. For instance, in her account of the strategies through which, the trauma of rape may be communicated, the cultural theorist Mieke Bal proposes a semiotics that shifts emphasis from overarching narratives and rhetorical projections toward a focus on detail and images, and toward the perspective of the victim—a “hysteric” semiotics. As Pollock notes (1999, 254), such “hysteric” readings are proposed by Bal “in order to read the unsaid, recover the repressed, and interpret the distorting signs of unspeakable experience.” This chapter directs the question posed by Bal toward the representation of hysteria itself: “What kind of semiotic do we need to apply in order to read the unsaid, to recover the repressed, to interpret the distorting sign of unspeakable experience?” (1991, 62). In what follows, Aura Hysterica: Les Exercices De La Passion (1992), created by Canadian artist Nicole Jolicoeur, is analyzed as just such a “hysteric” reading of the institutional representation of hysteria in the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. It considers the means by which Aura Hysterica disrupts this coercive designatory force and exemplifies a mode of representation infused by the experience it seeks to approach. After tracing the logic of an institutional representation of hysteria bent on establishing a paradigmatic conception of the psychic realities it examines, I explore the way in which this “designatory” gaze is refracted in the work of Jolicoeur: how her work produces a kaleidoscopic view of mental disorder and identity that acknowledges the complexity of both and that challenges the categorical mastery of the medical gaze, suggesting a way of looking at photographs of others that evades such mastery. Aura Hysterica exemplifies Jolicoeur’s sustained examination of the role of photography and the gaze in shaping the way individual human beings (notably women) come to conceive of themselves—in relation to the way in which they are conceived by others (notably groups of powerful

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men). In several series of works Jolicoeur has examined—often through reconfigurations of historical documents—such systems of designation. In her work, which often re-presents existing archival photographs, she stages the complexities and conflicts involved in self-conception by foregrounding the activity of the viewer. Aura Hysterica pursues this by disrupting and complicating the viewer’s reception of information. Photographs and drawings from the Iconographie are reconfigured and juxtaposed, so that the directive, narrative logic of the original document is relegated below the associative, imaginary activity of the reader. Textual information is minimized, and linear readings are made impossible by the structure of the book, the leaves of which fold out along its axes to form a large cruciform shape. Engagement and interaction are prioritized over the transmission of authorial ideas. The work is contained in a 23-centimeter square envelope, fronted by the uncaptioned image of Louise Augustine Gleizes, or “Augustine,” as she became known when she was admitted to the Salpêtrière (Fig. 7.1). Augustine is the central figure of Aura Hysterica, a subject who has become emblematic of the conflict between representation and identification that is staged via the concept of hysteria.

The Perverse Reconfigurations of Aura Hysterica Aura Hysterica was produced as a limited-edition photographic book work that draws upon an installation called Augustine (1992). It provides a visual rejoinder to discourses which have problematized orthodox conceptions of identity—in particular female identity and its formation in social experience, since the late nineteenth century. Jolicoeur draws upon the famous archive of images of hysteric patients created under the auspices of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital, between 1878 and 1880. She exposes implications of these images that are repressed by their original staging in the Iconographie, using a number of visual strategies to confront their linguistic “fixing” and reduction. Aura Hysterica positions six photographs of Augustine on the axes of the unfolded cross. This symbolically cruciform format of the work prevents conventional modes of reading, and demands non-linear, interactive engagements with it. The pages can be folded to produce juxtapositions of the photographs and drawings described below. A ludic, associative form of viewing is encouraged—with the viewer generating rather than receiving meaning. Five of the photographs are captioned by a single word

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Fig. 7.1  Paul Regnard, Hystéro-Épilepsie État Normal, from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service de M.  Charcot), 1878, photogravure. (Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program)

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drawn from Charcot’s description of the supposed states of hysteria. But these words are extracted from the logic of longer accounts in the Iconographie, which detail the ostensible significance of the states depicted. Isolated in this way, the words lose their designatory power, becoming instead indeterminate, poetic accompaniments to the photographs, which in turn cease to be anchored to specific meanings. On the reverse side of the “cross,” Jolicoeur positions a series of linear drawings. At first these appear to be abstract organic forms, but in fact the images are reconfigurations of original drawings by Paul Richer—an anatomist and psychologist assisting Charcot at Salpêtrière—who attempted to document the manifestations of hysteria in his “Synoptic Table” of hysterical attacks. These drawings in Aura Hysterica layer elements of Richer’s drawings, which supposedly represented the bodies of women in “hysterical” motion. Jolicoeur’s drawings, which appear on the obverse side of the photographs, rework the originals so that they lose all figurative reference and signify nothing of the illness. The resulting figures are “disembodied”—reduced to a series of intertwined lines which evade their original descriptive function and evoke instead a sense of liberated movement and interpenetration (Fig.  7.2). They are captioned by short phrases drawn from the notional manifestations of hysteria identified by Charcot, such as “spasme” and “palpitation cardiaque.” The link between words and images is weakened and the search for a conclusive meaning in the relation between the two is thwarted. The directive force of such representation, where words conventionally orchestrate the meaning of the image, is transformed into a prolonged associative encounter. The verbal ties that usually bind image to meaning are unwound. In this way Aura Hysterica confronts the designatory power of the Iconographie, which utilizes photography and text as a means of establishing the existence of hysteria as an organic illness affecting the mind and body. Jolicoeur scrambles those signals in the Iconographie which reinforce a conception of women, their sexuality and identity, and graphically evidences the effort to align their actual identity with this conception, through a panoply of representational processes. The photographic documentation of women who were the subjects of experiments at Salpêtrière exemplifies a process of abstraction and reduction, in which living persons become personifications of a concept. Such designatory representational processes are frequently the harbinger of physical and psychic harm, as human beings are coerced into conformity with the precepts of the representing regime. But Jolicoeur’s

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Fig. 7.2  Nicole Jolicoeur, SENSATION DE BOULE page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux

process of reconfiguration is a reminder that such documents can also provide ammunition against their own coercions. Aura Hysterica, accordingly, can be seen as an act of recovery in response to these photographs of hysterics, an act that re-animates somatic signals of their existence and

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experience against the closures of identity attribution. Parallels can be drawn here with another example of representational designation (transatlantic slavery) in which living beings were coerced into identities constructed for them by representational regimes. The photography theorist Ariella Azoulay (2008, 179) warns against readings of photographs of others in which the coercive origins of the document are read simply as a burial of its referent: It would be a mistake to analyze what our eyes behold as an encounter between the woman and the photographer alone, just as it is a mistake to analyze the photographic situation only in terms of an oppression whose modes and forms are realized completely through the threatening whip of the master.

Like Azoulay, Jolicoeur identifies the potential of oppressed, photographed subjects to transmit embodied signals beyond the scene of the photographic concretion of their oppression. These are signals to future viewers who may recognize in the representation, a humanity that exceeds the reductive precepts of the photograph. Jolicoeur’s recontextualization of the Salpêtrière photographs has the effect of amplifying such signals. Aura Hysterica interrogates the notion of hysteria visually, in ways that align with the textual interrogations of hysteria undertaken in recent psychoanalytic thought, and by psychoanalytically inspired feminisms. These find, in the phenomenon of hysteria itself, a disruptive force that confronts the classificatory function of language insofar as it is used to conceive of ourselves and others. By freeing the bodily manifestations of hysteria from regulatory language, Aura Hysterica exemplifies wider artistic practices that expose and challenge ideologically encoded verbal and visual systems of representation as they are brought to bear on identity. Jolicoeur’s focus on the particular institution, Salpêtrière, points beyond its walls to this instituting of identity itself. We are accustomed to thinking of incarceration as a punitive or protective isolation in which individuals are held captive, and subjected to regulatory regimes where the expression of identity is restricted. But the discourses of feminism and psychoanalysis question the extent to which the attribution of identity itself prescribes forms of being in which the precepts of power are internalized. Jolicoeur’s resistance to this scopic projection of identity enacts what Ulrich Baer has called “a salvaging, preservation, and rescue of reality” (2005, 24). The reality, that is, of traumatic, embodied experience insofar as it underpins

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identity. Underlying these reflections on Jolicoeur’s work is a conviction that visual reconfigurations of photographs can involve the viewer in the same “rescue” of such realities that the original presentations of the photographs served to obscure.

Somatic Language Against Projectile Representation One of the orthodoxies of representation complicated by psychoanalytical thought is that representation mirrors the world back to us; that as unified coherent “selves” we may utilize systems of representation to perceive and comprehend an external reality that is distinct from us. Lacanian strains of psychoanalytical thought in particular bring representation itself significantly closer to the center of self-perception and identification. In proposing that the self—the subject that perceives and conceives of what is external to it—is itself a byproduct of the external field of language, psychoanalysis radically complicates the idea of perception, the designation of identity, and conceptions of gender. Jacqueline Rose (2020, 54) notes this centrality of representation in the construction of identity in Lacanian terms: “For Lacan the subject is constituted through language—the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer.” She concludes: “men and women are only ever in language (‘men and women are signifiers bound to the common usage of language’—Lacan)” (73). We conceive of our world and other human beings in it through language; our “reality” is constituted by such representations, and the “we” or the “I” that thinks is also linguistically constituted. We too are, in part, representations, born of the particular symbolic order in which we exist; we self-conceive with what we are given, the terms of identity being prescribed. The symbolic order through which we establish this identity is not a free-floating natural phenomenon; it is conditioned by specific social formations. It is infused with the ideological precepts that are most conducive to the continued functioning of these social formations. Identity-­ norms are constantly tested against these precepts, and certain forms of identity align more smoothly than others with the socio-economic requirements, hierarchies, and power-relationships of a particular order. In the history of psychoanalytical and feminist thought, hysteria has offered evidence of a kind of somatic refusal of the designation of certain forms of experience and subjectivity as specifically female, and it is in this refusal that alternative modes of being are suggested. In such discourses,

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the symptoms of hysteria themselves reveal that the inscription of the symbolic order upon subjectivity does not go all the way down. So that while our identity may be formed in language, there is an aspect of it that remains untouched by the incursions of the symbolic order. An example of this war of inscription can be seen in two radically contrasting uses of photographic images of the same person: Louise Augustine Gleizes, who was a patient at Salpêtrière between 1875 and 1880. “Augustine” became a personification of hysteria, through her involvement in the production of a series of photographs of the manifestations of its symptoms. A selection of these images survives through the 1878 publication of the three-volume, archival Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. The Salpêtrière photographs of Augustine were instruments of Charcot’s clinical mission to explore and treat hysteria, as well as to demonstrate his own mastery by proving its existence in her, in the terms he established through the identification of its symptoms. Jolicoeur’s work holds a mirror to these processes of medicalized identification, and, by drawing attention to processes of designation, opens questions about the nature of the experience that lies beyond their reach. The documented symptoms of hysteria have been characterized in psychoanalytic and feminist thought as a kind of somatic language or, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz (1989, 134), as “the symptomatic acting out of a proposition that the hysteric cannot articulate.” The body articulates that which cannot be said for two key reasons. First, because the traumatic experiences that led to the symptoms arising are so threatening to the psychic consistency of the hysteric that they cannot be assimilated into consciousness. Secondly, because the verbal language in which they might be articulated, emanating as it does from a source of male power, cannot encompass the specifically female experiences of subjection that lie at the root of hysteria. Pollock (2013, 25) suggests that something we might think of as a somatic semiotics is revealed by hysteria: The difficulty of femininity expresses itself as hysteria: a body in trouble with language as the offered terms of being sexed and gendered or a body whose phantasmic elements become a kind of corporeal alphabet displacing words onto feelings, pains, anaesthesias, physical symptoms.

These symptoms are notable by their variety, unpredictability, and mimetic character. Augustine herself experienced violent seizures and fits—characterized by Charcot as Hystero-Epilepsy—in which her body became

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subject to dramatic contortions. George Didi-Huberman (1988, 122–123) refers to such descriptions in the Iconographie: the tangle of motor-disturbances that upset and nearly dislocate Augustine’s poor body as they are described in the Iconographie: “jolts,” “quakes,” “cramps,” “jumps,” and “throes” … Her contractures were unpredictable: her neck would suddenly twist so violently that her chin would pass her shoulder and touch her shoulder blade; her leg would suddenly stiffen, like a club foot, flexing until “the heel pressed against the perineum… the whole body became rigid; the arms stiffened, sometimes executing a more or less perfect circumduction; then they would often approach each other on the meridian line, the wrists touching each other on the dorsal side.”

These presentations would frequently be accompanied by disturbing enactments of rape and sexual assault that, in subsequent feminist psychoanalytical analyses, have cemented the relationship between hysteria and sexual trauma. An account of Augustine’s own childhood rape and molestation is documented by Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, Charcot’s assistant medical officer at Salpêtrière in the Salpêtrière archive. Augustine frequently re-enacted the scenario: “Augustine did not only play her ‘own’ role which would have been pain or mere ‘passivity.’ She merged her own suffering with the aggressive act, she would also play the assaulting body” (Didi-Huberman 1988, 157). None of these “scenes” became the subject of Charcot’s extensive photographic documentation. The trauma is somatically enacted, but omitted from the archival representation of the illness. It is an absence that suggests a deliberate or unconscious repression in the clinical archive itself. An absence which marks a gendered equivocation when it comes to symbolic transactions of the reality of women’s experience; an equivocation personified by Freud himself in his own theorizations of the relationship between childhood abuse and fantasy. Nonetheless, the interpretation of hysteria underpinning much feminist thought about its symptoms emerges from Freud’s initial conclusions about its causes. As observed by Didi-­ Huberman (1988, 161), Freud “came to believe that the specificity of hysteria’s cause lay in a precocious and cruel experience of sexual assault, which symbolizes itself, and replays itself in a ‘converted’ form in the [hysteric] attack.” This position of Freud opens up questions about the relationship of these early sexual traumas to the formation of female identity and

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language. Later feminist theorists conceive of how the trauma implicit in a violent enforcement of a sexual power relationship may bleed into the victim’s perception of her place in social relations. It conditions her perception of her own identity within these enforced norms, and it casts a deep shadow over attempts to conceive of her position in relation to language. Pollock’s account (1999, 108–109) of the origins of the psychoanalytic method emphasizes the significance of restoring a relationship to language and meaning through the difficult process whereby originary trauma is approached by different forms of language, first somatic, then verbal: Psychoanalysis … began with the young women known as hysterics who were said to “suffer from reminiscences” but of what, they could no longer recall—they were traumatised by events that were unspeakable … a bundle of symptoms in which their traumatic experiences of sexual abuse, betrayal and bereavement had been diverted from memory because the overwhelming immediacy remained undigestible by the subject’s psychic apparatus. These experiences had undergone conversion into a language of body signs: aphasia, anorexia, paralysis, localised pain and dysfunction, blindness, recurring gestures which retained even as metamorphic transpositions a telling literalness. Relief was produced by restoring events to memory and thus delivering them into representation.

This account of the vital role of representation in the psychic processing of trauma draws our attention to a void in the viable language available for the self-representation of a traumatic experience that is specifically female. Trauma occurs here as action upon the body, and, psychically unprocessed, it reverberates through the body/psyche in a closed-circuit of symptoms. Deprived of the necessary language to provide explanation or narrativize the experience of harm (occurring as a consequence of “given” gender identity) the only potential for psychic orientation lies within the body. The patients at Salpêtrière somatically signaled not just the psychic pain that was a byproduct of the event itself, but also a compounding of harm by the absence of a viable, verbal language to communicate it.

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Photography and Hysteria The use of photography in the taxonomy of patients such as Augustine in the Salpêtrière, through the creation of the Iconographie volumes, and their use to confer “truth” on a speculative condition, exemplifies the role of photography in bringing into being the subjects that are required by a particular representational regime. Augustine became the living proof of the existence of Charcot’s theorizations of hysteria, and it is notable that in the absence of the discovery of a cause, the drive to demonstrate the existence and symptoms of the illness intensified. Photography provided the perfect vehicle for the dissemination of these “proofs.” In a place and a practice already founded on the scopic, bodily identification of psychic abnormality, photographs took the medicalizing gaze that hitherto could only be temporarily fixed upon the patient, externalized it and fixed it into documents so that it could become the basis of a visual currency. Its “proofs” were propagated to confirm Charcot’s theory, in classes, lectures, and publications such as the Iconographie. But, as the work of Jolicoeur reveals, the subsequent history of the photographs made to serve this reductive purpose demonstrate that photography cannot be fully institutionalized, nor can the gaze be totally blinkered toward that which it is expected to regard. While the gaze and the image are always implicated in the processes of surveillance and designation, they never become fully enslaved to these ends. Photography may be employed as a means of cementing the identity and augmenting the control of institutions by disseminating their truths; but it is the potential errance of the gaze and imagination around the subject of the resulting photograph that activates the characteristic dialectic of photography itself—the perpetual discrepancy between phenomena and their representation. At Salpêtrière, perhaps in recognition of its tendency to evade its intended meaning, photography was treated in much the same way as the hysterics who were its subjects. After the failure of the first textually sparse volume of the Iconographie to communicate much about hysteria, in the second volume an abundance of textual material attempts to explain the signals transmitted by the women in the photographs. These captions and texts direct whatever was signaled by the photograph that did not correspond to the “logos” of the institution toward singular meaning, and Charcot instituted this meaning.

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The photographs of the Iconographie cement a gaze that is already institutionally frozen by language. Charcot’s method of diagnosis was visual, but, judging by his inability to conceive of a link between the women he observed and their previous experience, his was a projectile vision rather than an exploratory one (Didi-Huberman 1988, 22–26). Charcot’s procedure for diagnosis suggests a kind of symptomatic identification parade. Patients were brought to him, stripped and subjected to his long silent gaze. His silence was interrupted only by directives, for the patient to move, speak, or have their reflexes tested. We cannot know what imaginary or diagnostic processes were occurring during this gaze, but as evidenced by its concretion in the practices of the Salpêtrière, Charcot’s apparently reflective, ponderous gaze is in fact the projection of an “idée fixee” (Didi-Huberman 1988, 20). Charcot intensified the subjugating power of the gaze by ostentatiously performing it, but what is ostensibly observed and discovered within the patient, is in fact only the confirmation of his preconception. Charcot is the purveyor of a Medusan clinical gaze, which transforms the living beings it surveys into types. The existence of those seen, solicits no questions that may problematize extant knowledge—only normative answers. As far as Charcot is concerned, the Iconographie photographs provide proof of the diagnosis, but they can only do this when their communicative potential is overridden by language in captions and notes. The image thus becomes a surrogate word, and while Charcot regards the image as distinct from language, he does not dare to undo its textual bondage. Tethered in this way the photograph provides no more access to the troubled being of the patient than his gaze upon their body does; it is reduced to a visual prop for a linguistic “known.”

Aura Hysterica as a Détournement of Typology Printed on the enclosing envelope of Aura Hysterica is a small, square image of a woman’s face (Fig. 7.3). She is framed by uninterrupted darkness of the background. The right hand touches her face, which is tilted slightly, hardly resting on her fingers and thumb. The texture of the photograph and her clothing place her in the past, but not her face, which looks directly toward us calmly, without significant expression, almost smiling. We are addressed by her gaze. The neutrality of the image solicits our projections; in the absence of an easily classifiable expression, and in the absence of words, we must read into the face. Her returned gaze is

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Fig. 7.3  Nicole Jolicoeur, untitled (Augustine) page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux

loaded, but we cannot know with what. If a word suggesting some nameable characteristic appeared in proximity to the image, we would surely find traces of it in this face; but there is no textual comfort to put an end to the maddening struggle to characterize. We do not know who she is, what she is experiencing, but (and this may be purely a consequence of an ignorance born of textual deprivation) she appears to know; we presume her to know. The woman remains, in the dark of the image, enigmatically self-possessed (we cannot possess her with knowledge). This image is a subtly reconfigured reproduction of the first image of Augustine that appears in the Iconographie. It appears on the front of the envelope which encloses Nicole Jolicoeur’s Aura Hysterica. It is cropped from the original so that the clothing which might enable us to date the photograph is less apparent with the result that attention is focused on her face. It is unmoored from its textual anchoring in the original volume, where it is captioned to provide an explanation of what (not who) we are seeing, and load the image with a clinical significance that is imperceptible

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in the photograph itself. The context of the original photograph forces a relationship between caption and image that deters reflection on the state and identity of the woman in the photograph. Our questions about her expression are immediately cut short by the “announcement” that we are seeing an example of a hysteric-epileptic in a “normal state” (Fig.  7.1). Further reinforcement occurs in the Iconographie text on the pages surrounding this, and around other more dramatic and disturbing images of Augustine, which describe her symptoms and hysteric attacks while the text (in case this first photograph of her raises any doubts about the existence of her illness) also directs us to signs in her “normal state” of latent hysteria (Didi-Huberman 1988, 165): Everything about her, moreover announces the hysteric. The care she puts into her toilet, the arrangement of her hair, the ribbons she is so happy to don. This need for ornament is so keen that if in the course of an attack there is a remission, she takes advantage of it to attach a ribbon to her garment; this distracts her and gives her pleasure.

Texts such as this which accompany the photographs of Augustine that appear in the Iconographie are written by Désiré-Magloire Bourneville. They attempt to identify the nature of Augustine’s illness in ways that demonstrate condescension, stereotyping, and clinical reductivism. But these are accompanied with what at times seems to be a genuine concern to understand the origins of her illness. Bourneville, unlike Charcot, was attentive to Augustine’s words, whether uttered during hysteric attacks, or recounted in relatively calm states. It is because of Bourneville that something of Augustine’s voice is heard in the Iconographie. He reflected on her history and—twenty years before Freud—tentatively suggested connections between childhood bodily trauma and hysteria; implying in the process that the illness was psycho-somatic; that the “hysteric” contortions and seizures captured in photographs were externalizations of the embedded and repressed memory of this pain (Baer 2005, 27). Bourneville is an agent of representation torn between the closures of designation and the potential of empathy. This is why Jolicoeur’s excision of Bourneville’s text from Aura Hysterica is not a simple refutation of his conclusions about who or what Augustine was; rather, it is the creation of a sign of the undesignated human who exists apart from and beyond any linguistic construction. Jolicoeur’s apparently simple yet radical isolation and re-presentation of

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Augustine’s face in Aura Hysterica draws attention to the conflict between forces of assumed knowledge and experiential, internal realities that evade easy conceptualization. Aura Hysterica is a response to imagery from the Salpêtrière archive, an archive that aligns with wider representational mechanisms that transform bodily signals of experience into coded knowledge. These somatic signals are communicative emanations of experience, and without the authorization of the caption, the image-as-signal runs riot. Signals of the impact of the external world on our bodies and psyches, when captured photographically, are absorbed into the discursive currency of signifying regimes. As soon as they enter matrices of communication, such photographs are encoded, their signals frozen by whatever dominant logic prevails. But it is also by virtue of this freezing that somatic signals survive in photographs. In Aura Hysterica Jolicoeur disinters the somatic signals of Augustine. She renders the Salpêtrière photographs “hysterical” in their unlimited propensity to “mean”—in their capacity to proliferate meaning and evade clinical taxonomy. This is a reclamation of hysteria as a force of excess which pushes beyond the confinements of institutional meaning. A focus on the visual grammar of Aura Hysterica (Jolicoeur’s hystericization of the Iconographie) enables us to explore this strategy further. She reframes a very particular set of images from the Iconographie, which appear to show Augustine displaying internal states that represent stages of a hysterical attack: captioned in the original volumes as “Muscular Hyper-Excitability,” “Lethargy,” and “Catalepsy.” These images, if less graphic and immediately disturbing than others in the Iconographie, present, in their original context, a complex scenario of inscription, designation, mastery, control, and compliance. They are photographs of Augustine in a period of “remission” from hysteria, but hypnotized back into a temporary hysteric state. A kind of “synthesized hysteria” in which she, under instruction from Charcot, “unconsciously” enacts the symptoms he requires (Didi-Huberman 1988, 185). The images are photographic equivalents of Charcot’s medical and public demonstrations of “somnambulistic hysteria,” in which the body of Augustine is transformed into a malleable projection of hysteria theory. These demonstrations of pseudo-hysteria could hardly enhance serious investigation of the disease, but their value for Charcot was that patients could be summoned at his command to provide visual manifestations of a semblance of the disease. The actions and manipulated postures of Augustine in the photographs provided no evidence of the existence or

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nature of hysteria (Augustine was not “hysteric” when these photographs were taken). But they are documents of what Charcot wished his audience to believe hysteria looked like. They record Charcot’s projection of his own reality into the bodies of others. In selecting only these photographs for Aura Hysterica, Jolicoeur goes to the heart of the question of what can remain of Augustine in images that appear to be so fully determined by a theory of who she is. What, of her, can be salvaged from a series of images which signify an identity reduced to an automaton of clinical projections? In the hands of Jolicoeur, these documents of dispossession and submission are re-presented as both a scrambling of Charcot’s designations and a disturbance of designation itself. Jolicoeur removes all clinical appellations from the photographs and re-captions them with single words. These words invest the image with a productive ambiguity in which we are alerted to the agency of both Augustine and some external force. CALIN [hug], for instance, captions an image of an apparently sleeping Augustine, seated with her arms raised to her shoulders and her hands twisted awkwardly away from each other (Fig.  7.4). Her fingers and thumbs form a “pinching” gesture. A self-­ protective embrace is suggested as if, in her somnambulistic state, she is imagining being held by another. But the French word calin also evokes the coaxing, persuasion, and manipulation of the hypnotic process. The conflict between internal desire and external coercion, implicit in the image, are amplified by this simple text. The word PLATEAU captions an infamous image of Augustine, her body hypnotized and manipulated into total rigidity, forming a bridge between two chairs. Of all the images in the Salpêtrière collection this is the one showing the objectification of Augustine at its most literal. As Bourneville (Didi-­Huberman 1988, 192) describes it: Her head is pressed against the back of a chair, then the muscles of her back, thighs and legs are rubbed, and her feet are placed on a second chair: the rigid body remains in this position for rather long time (the experiment has never been prolonged for more than four or five minutes); it is possible to place a weight of 40 kilograms on the stomach without causing the body to bend.

The photographic studio at Salpêtrière, in which the photograph was taken, mimics a shadowy domestic interior where the body of Augustine is positioned as a bizarre adjunct to the furniture. Augustine hovers

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Fig. 7.4  Nicole Jolicoeur, CALIN page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux

somewhere between mortification and spectrality; rigid functionality and supernatural levitation are simultaneously suggested. She is both a solid “thing” and a ghostly apparition. And the ambiguous connotation of the single word “plateau,” with its evocations in French of both domestic objects and the theatrical stage, emphasizes the layers of performative instrumentalization at work in the production of the image. An image of Augustine smiling, looking beyond the right-hand frame of the photograph and, in apparent amusement, blowing a kiss (perhaps to someone unknown off-camera) bears this caption in the original Iconographie: Plate xviii. CATALEPSIE. SUGGESTION.

In Jolicoeur’s Aura Hysterica the designatory, symptomatizing text is replaced by the descriptive BAISER (or “Kiss”). The new caption reinforces what is knowable from the image: Augustine is blowing a kiss. More than the others, in this image something of Augustine appears to have

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human agency, her expression (apparently amused, evincing pleasure) is clearly visible. But the relationship between the word, the image, and what is suggested by the other images is ambiguous enough to trigger an oscillation of connotations between description and command. There is an “off-stage” presence, be it in the photographic studio, or perhaps only in the mind of Augustine, who may be soliciting a performance of affection. In each case, Jolicoeur’s re-captioning undermines the prior truth-claims of the photographs by drawing attention to the event of their creation and the traumas associated with it. At the center of the crucifix formed by the pages of Aura Hysterica, a feint reproduction of the first photograph of Augustine appears. The un-­ cropped and captioned (“Augustine”) photograph is overlaid with Richer’s simple line drawing of a woman clad in a long dress who, because of her posture and the almost horizontal rendering of her hair, appears to be flying (Fig. 7.5). The dimly perceptible photograph beneath it augments the ethereal quality of the flowing lines of the drawing. The overlay creates a perceptual fusion of the two images. In order to distinguish them, our attention must alternate from one to the other in an “ecstatic” act of looking that has the effect of unfixing the photo-graphic stasis of both images. It is hard not to associate the drawing of the “flying” woman (at the center of a cruciform book) with the Christian iconography of spirits or angels. Her arms are open, and one arm is raised above her as if she were swimming through the air. Her dress flows. There is no ground under her feet. The effect of the transposition is to suggest the intermingling of Augustine with this “spirit,” as if the two figures mutually embody each other—as if Augustine is taking flight. This suggestion of freedom and abandon, in the combined image, counter the original function of both drawing and photograph. This “flying” woman is a slightly modified (inverted) reproduction of a small drawing from Richer’s diagrammatic work: The Synoptic Table of the Complete and Regular Great Hysterical Attack, which depicts 82 of these stages. Like the photographs in the Iconographie, the table details the progression of the hysterical event through these stages. They begin with apparent “mimicry” of epileptic seizures and progress to contortions or “illogical movements” that are characterized as clownism. This stage is followed by an expression of emotions described as attitudes passionelle, before the final and most dangerous stage of terminal delirium in which hysterics begin to speak! Speech which Charcot characterized as “incessant babbling” (Baer 2005, 34).

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Fig. 7.5  Nicole Jolicoeur, AUGUSTINE page from Aura Hysterica, Les Exercises de la Passion, 1992, image courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Guy L’Heureux

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The synoptic table, which was widely disseminated in clinics, became the authoritative “measure” of hysteria. The drawing that fuses with the Iconographie photograph of Augustine in her “normal” state in Aura Hysterica represents in Richer’s table, a “precursor” or prodrome state of the hysteric attack in which the patient manifests an “aura” (the aura hysterica) to announce its arrival. The fusion of these two images at once reminds us of the way the clinical gaze scrutinizes even those instances of female being in which hysteria or aberration is “latent.” But the process of overlaying neutralizes the linguistic message to produce instead a suggestion of psychic flight from the classificatory, normalizing gaze.

Somatic Semiotics The Salpêtrière exemplifies an apparatus of visibility, a “great optical machine” (Didi-Huberman 1988, 9) in which the status of the gaze as a carrier of designatory power is exemplified. But in spite of its propensity to subjugate, such a gaze is not the property of individuals, and that which it surveys cannot be definitively appropriated into its demands. The hysteric also participates in the gaze and its exchanges, with somatic responses to its demands. The hysteric deflects the imposition of identity, and signals identity-states beyond this imposition through a multitude of “attitudes passionelles.” She confronts the gaze and proliferates somatic signals; simultaneously communicating her experience and refracting the symptomatology that abstracts it. Augustine and her fellow hysterics scrambled the concept of hysteria even as it was being formulated. The legion of signals emanating from patients at Salpêtrière made diagnosis based on singular identity impossible. Augustine’s “personas” run riot: she re-enacts her role as victim and that of her rapist; she conflates current desire and past abuse; she presents, and then violently resists, projected female stereotypes. Ultimately, beyond the mental disorder designated by the term “hysteria” she enacts a form of somatic, semiotic resistance to a conception of the self projected from external sources. Somatic signals are photographically frozen, in the Iconographie as part of the designatory process. But it is through this very freezing that they persist as an element of exchange that, in times of future thaw, can be reanimated and transmitted, and it is just such a reanimation that is undertaken by Jolicoeur in Aura Hysterica.

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Returning to the question posed by Mieke Bal, with which I began: the poetic, “hysteric” semiotics proposed as a means of recovering and communicating the unspeakable finds visual form in Jolicoeur’s work. Jolicoeur takes the textual markers of classificatory speech and reconfigures them in poetic form. In Aura Hysterica we are guided in our understanding of Augustine’s gestures and actions, only by Jolicoeur’s fragmentation and recombination of remnants of the clinical texts. These phrases, repurposed as captions, serve to proliferate rather than to reduce possible meanings; the stockades of textual explanation that characterize the Iconographie are breached, and the images of her bodily presence are freed from their original semiotic function so that they may communicate ecstatically. Where classical hysteria famously proposed a specifically female biological errance in which the womb “wandered” through the body, a comparable semiotic errancy, where bodily performance evades singularity of meaning, is activated by Jolicouer’s reconfiguration of the Iconographie photographs. Images of Augustine in Aura Hysterica offer the same resistance now, to our projections of verbal meaning, as her embodied presence did to Charcot then. She evades conceptualization as an avatar of any static form of identity, simultaneously signaling states of disturbance and amusement, compliance and defiance, passivity and curiosity. Signs of martyrdom coexist with those of mirth, signs of happiness with those of harm. This is a somatic semiotics that evades the concretion of meaning, and generates instead resistant signs of strangeness and complexity.

References Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books. MIT Press. Baer, Ulrich. 2005. Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bal, Mieke. 1991. Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourneville, Désiré-Magloire, and Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard. 1878. Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (Service De M Charcot). Volumes I–III 1876–1880. Paris: Bureaux du Progres Medical/Delahaye and Lecrosnier. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1988/2003. The Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1989. Sexual Subversions. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.

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Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. J Paul Getty Museum Archive. http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/59379/desire-­m agloire-­ bourneville-­paul-­marie-­leon-­r egnard-­iconographie-­photographique-­de-­la-­ Salpêtrière-­service-­de-­m-­charcot-­french-­1878/. Accessed 20 February 2022. Jolicoeur, Nicole. 1992. Aura Hysterica, Les Exercices De La Passion. Montreal: Galerie Articule. Pollock, Griselda. 1999. Differencing the Canon. London: Routledge. ———. 2013. After Affects-After Images. Manchester: University Press. Rose, Jacqueline. 2020. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 8

Buried Images, Ritual Selves: Looking at South Asian Mental Health in Gauri Gill’s Acts of Appearance Eric Patel

Brinjals and bhaji should be cooked together Alone I lay awake in your bed at night … My friend has changed As gram is changed into pulse As the least heat burns the bread in the pan So for one word of mine You have caught fire A Dadariya of Seoni, Songs of The Forest

Songs, like the one opening this chapter, have a mysterious, almost shamanic way of unearthing the visceral. Even when they are not heard in our vicinity, thanks to them, bliss, forbidden memories, altered states of consciousness, and musical imagery can seem to arise from emotions beneath the surface of behavior and experience (Cotter and Silvia 2021). Throughout the Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh states in India, the

E. Patel (*) New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_8

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dadariya are known as short, exchangeable forest verses that Gond lovers freely sing “to each other from opposite banks of a river or by workers in the fields and woodcutters as they chop their trees” (Hivale and Elwin 1935, 47). Despite taking root in daily life, dadariyas, which are largely unexamined outside of colonial and ethnographic encounters, convey a vivid collective voice which can reify emotions and ideas of the self in South Asia. Such songs, also known as Adivasi folk songs (named after the Adivasis, Indigenous People of India), seem to contain a psychosomatic quality capable of sounding feelings through the body and images. Although this kind of radical openness may not be new for songs in general, the shifting social, economic, and psychological conditions under which these songs are made have received little attention. In his catalog The Perceiving Fingers, Jagdish Swaminathan, who founded Bharat Bhavan for the purpose of exhibiting work by Adivasi visual artists, sheds light on systemic caste-based exclusion in histories of contemporary art versus “tribal” crafts (1987). Delinking his approach from Verrier Elwin’s ethnography of the Adivasis, Swaminathan wrote at the end of one of his curatorial essays: “Ours is an attempt to open our eyes to their art. If we have started on a rather grim note, it is despite the anguish of the [Gond] Karma song, not because of any loss of the Adivasi’s creative exuberance, but our own concern for our own myopia” (Hacker 2014, 194). Due to imperialist primitivist imaginaries and divisive meanings of the word “tribal” which survive on colonial ethnology in Indian government practices and legal categories (i.e., Denotified Tribes and Scheduled Tribes), complex issues in heritage claims, and epistemic and caste violence in precolonial, colonial, and neocolonial capitalist contexts (Da Costa 2019, 509–511), this chapter refers to the Adivasis as Indigenous People, including the Gond, Warli, and Kokna groups mentioned herein. Adivasis are by no means considered a monolithic group and comprise of approximately 100  million people with more than 600 socio-culturally autochthonous language and kinship groups, and as Indigenous People of India, they have been persistently economically and sociologically oppressed because of differences between their cultures, religions, and kinship systems and a hegemonic Hindu caste system (Guzy 2016, 35). Furthermore, the important process of Adivasis claiming and preserving “alternative archives and alternative histories of their own” (Banerjee 2016, 132) must not be overlooked when approaching their songs or images given caste violence, oppression, and exclusion imposed by the facades of music culture revival by right-wing Hindu nationalist politics in

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claims of saving tradition (Ajotikar 2021, 105). As literary critic and activist G.N. Devy notes, there is an assumption that a truth about the Adivasis lies beyond “the realm of the verbal” and exists somewhere in “the darkness of the jungle,” which one can enter only by accepting their “rituals, superstitions, and conventions on their own terms” (Purohit 2020, 55). Moving away from this static and partially essentialist overtone which situates a universal truth entangled in the jungle, could Adivasi voices be listened to differently, nonverbally or even opaquely through the image? Can such voices be a rhythmic continuum from inner to outer worlds, from experiential layers of the self to in/visible expressions of life-­affirming intimacies? While recognizing the profound power of Adivasi songs to stir emotions and generate social realities, their individual and collective voice, presented with consecrated masks and secular, spiritual, or religious ritual, could also echo another set of configurations. Some art historical texts have already foregrounded and discussed Adivasi image-making practices (Satyawadi 2010), primarily various paintings and murals by the Warlis; however, significantly less attention in the field has been given to Adivasi artists using photography or working as a group with photographers. The Indian artist Gauri Gill is a recent example of someone working with photography and in close cooperation with Adivasis from the Kokna and Warli communities who live in the rural Jawhar district of Maharashtra. For her ongoing image series called Acts of Appearance, Gill began a commission in 2014 with Adivasi papier-mâché artists, their families, and a group of actor volunteers. In what can be interpreted as a long-form engagement of listening and conversing with Adivasis, she asked them to create new masks, not as they usually would in their village rituals or processions, but, as her artist statement describes, in their own subjective interpretations of “rasas (emotions) and those experiences common to all humans, such as sickness, relationships, or aging” (Gill 2021). Gill’s poetic images of Adivasis performing rasas and their own experiences problematize a tension between the stories they tell about their different selves and ask why sometimes, in order to be accepted or believed, there is too often little or no choice to have them told by others. Thus, despite various forms of self-reflexive research which have contributed to understandings of Adivasi life, historian and political theorist Prathama Banerjee argues that they “continue to be seen as purely ethnographic subjects, with very limited possibility of their appearing as either historical or economic or literary or even religious subjects in their own right” (2016, 132; emphasis added). By attuning Banerjee’s view to the position of Adivasis in Gill’s

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series, this chapter asks what im/possibilities do they have for appearing as or beyond scripted photographic subjects, but also how would they reconfigure and articulate subjectivities in their own images? While Gill did not make the series with the intent of generating discussion around South Asian mental health, her images can be read as a site for understanding bipolar disorder (BD) through concepts of in/visibility and spatiality/temporality. BD has been defined as a disability and lifelong mood disorder with episodes containing varying degrees of mania and depression (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Given that BD is mostly an invisible disability, the masked figures shown in Acts of Appearance—with their various human and nonhuman forms, facial expressions, and uncanny movement in the rituals of daily village life— symbolize multivalent or submerged selves which can be helpful for dismantling social stigma and reflecting on BD diagnosis and treatment options. By challenging what it means to be multiple versions of one’s self, and why these selves may be perceived as treatable or untreatable, normal or abnormal, Gill’s images prepare a ground for looking at how BD is rendered in/visible in South Asian mental health. Acts of Appearance, if witnessed as a self-determined, nonlinear, communal narrative voice, can demonstrate the imaginative possibilities of masks in photography in order to resist ideas of the self as a stable, visible presence, and, in doing so, subvert and recover spatial and temporal categories of relationality. What follows is a visual culture discussion on the importance and relevance of photography to South Asian mental health, specifically in the case of BD. Engaging with photography as a multiverse of the everyday, the self and in/visibility, the chapter proposes a counter narrative to the standard, yet ambiguous boundaries of conceptualizing and diagnosing BD. The analysis of Gill’s image series will draw upon concepts of in/visibility and spatiality/temporality in four sections to examine how Adivasi masks and agency question entrenched assumptions of selfhood and have potential to reframe BD experiences. In the first section, definitions and studies of BD from Western and transcultural perspectives serve as background for examining ideas of the self in South Asia against social agreements on cultural perspectives of “normal” and “abnormal” mental health. The second section reviews Gill’s Acts of Appearance through concepts of invisibility and visibility, medium-specific attributes of photography which can contest hegemonic thoughts on BD. The third section explores how Adivasi masks, when combined with Gill’s photography, generate multiple forms of spatiality/temporality and communal narrative voice. The

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chapter concludes with an ethical discussion on Adivasi agency and why this is crucial to acknowledge in the light of South Asian mental health and photography.

Perspectives on Bipolar Disorder BD is a prevalent and serious mental health illness but is not well understood today. In psychiatry practiced in the United States, BD is characterized by severe fluctuations in mood, energy levels, and ability to function, which includes recurrent episodes of depression, mania, and hypomania, and is sometimes accompanied by psychotic features (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Genetic risk, race, gender, and culture are a small array of factors that researchers and clinicians have used to comprehend the impact of BD on cognition, emotion regulation, and quality of life, as well as debate symptoms, course, and the utility of medications and/or psychotherapy treatment options (Colom et al. 1998; Moini et al. 2021). The field of BD is complex and not without its share of controversies and revisions around validity of diagnostic criteria and treatment systems. As such, this section will give special attention to a few models relevant to mental health and photography which look into transcultural forms of care focused on alleviating suffering and stigma. Put simply, the issue here is one of position—how can the self resist normative framings of BD? For subsequent sections, these views will contextualize fissures and forges in reading Gill’s series. Although not often recognized in public, familial, or communal settings in South Asia, the magnitude and scope of people effected by BD is significant and lends additional urgency to this long-term problem. In their survey of epidemiological studies in Asia, several psychologists recently identified important factors and patterns of BD which are region specific. They show that BD on a global level “ranks 5th in contributing to a loss of functioning and imparts substantial individual and societal burden,” and that “the South Asian region houses one-fifth of people with mental illness worldwide and yet, much remains to be explored regarding the prevailing course patterns of BD in Asia and the associated factors” (Subramanian et  al. 2017, 16). And yet, according to psychologists Chaturvedi and Desai, mental health continues to remain a neglected and understudied field throughout South Asian countries and “despite gaining recognition as a major health concern, the development of treatment services has not kept pace with other health specialties” (2015, 35). In

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addition, they note that the training of mental healthcare workers in South Asia has been influenced by Western models, which have their own pros and cons, the main downside being a “lack of understanding of the cultural aspects of mental illness presentations, help-seeking behaviours and indigenous practices” (36). What kind of approaches or interventions could begin to possibly reconcile these issues in diagnosis and treatment? What follows is a closer look at clinically oriented, interdisciplinary, and transcultural views on BD with the aim of understanding their relationship to image-making and vice versa. Within these models, conceptions of the self will be crucial to the framing of BD. Since the conception of the self in BD contexts is defined differently in the West, where biomedical models are prevalent, treatment options often do not attend to specific social, cultural, and spiritual parameters of the self in South Asia, let alone accommodate photographic interventions. Treatment options for BD in South Asia could benefit from critical evaluation of imported or Western psychology models and move toward reconciling interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transnational methods with empirical findings already on the ground. Going further, such a framework can center the role of Adivasi knowledge systems in image-making, highlight specific photographic methods relevant to generating interpretations of BD, and converge with transcultural theories of emotions in relation to aesthetics, emancipation, and the self. Within South Asia, the evolving field of Indian Psychology (IP) uniquely addresses intrinsic states of the self and centers trans-historical theories integrating connections between the mind, body, and consciousness (Dalal and Misra 2010, 138). While certain aspects of IP remain problematic, such as a lack of inclusion of women practitioners and critical engagement with concepts rooted in caste ideologies linked to Indian state-sanctioned and communal violence, two areas will be highlighted for their cultural specificity in an attempt to bridge them inside and outside of South Asia. First, as an “endogenous psychology” IP attempts to accommodate a diverse set of existing thought systems including Yoga, Jainism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Sikhism, to name a select few (Dalal and Misra 2010, 133). Second, given that BD is not only limited to an individual’s experience, it is also felt on a communal or societal level and therefore must also be read through social, cultural, ontological, and epistemological assumptions which IP can begin to accommodate both in and as South Asian contexts. Since there are no universal rules that can be applied to all BD experiences, the above mentioned problems point to a need for IP to look across or outside of its own field if it wishes to fulfill its stated goals of

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complimenting and differentiating itself from Indigenous psychologies of panhuman interest, transformation, and empowerment. Among serious mental health illnesses in South Asia, why do we need to look at BD and how can we begin to understand it through photography? Mental healthcare workers and researchers have already initiated several studies that continue to identify important socio-cultural registers where treatments of BD could benefit through deeper inquiry (Grover et al. 2017; Tanna 2021; Saha et al. 2020). Among the desired aims stated in the latter study, such as improving daily emotional and intellectual skills required to thrive in South Asian communities with minimal intervention, the consideration of potential social and mental health changes enabled through Adivasi performances and photography is remarkably absent. While it is important to acknowledge performances may not be effective or desired in community-based interventions, anthropologist Alice Tilche writes that becoming Adivasi can be viewed as a performative act under situations of duress and how, “these everyday acts of becoming not only reflect but also affect culture. They also exist alongside cultural and political performances that are more conscious and reflexive, oriented back toward an imagined past and forward toward the future and an audience” (2022, 164). It is precisely these socio-cultural elements of performing, becoming, indigeneity, and imagination that are lacking in a multi-accentual understanding of BD in South Asia, which Gill’s images with Adivasis begin to articulate. With a transcultural mental health position in mind, let us attempt to center, recognize, and return to the subjectivity of BD experiences by looking at Gill’s Acts of Appearance as a continuous rehearsal and an imaginative reckoning of the relationship between, indigeneity, in/ visibility, and spatiality/temporality.

My Friend Has Changed: Image and In/Visibility In the 2018 exhibition brochure for the Museum of Modern Art P.S.1 for Acts of Appearance, curator Lucy Gallun describes how Gill’s work with the Adivasis makes visible a different or unexpected conception of the self, one that is “layered rather than one-dimensional, influenced not only by custom or religion but also by metaphor and imagination, by everyday experiences, by relations to other living beings as well as inanimate things, and by the landscape” (2018, 1). Untitled (9) is one example among Gill’s images in the series that confronts the viewer with endless layers of the self (Fig. 8.1). Since it takes place in a medical setting, it also becomes relevant

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Fig. 8.1  Gauri Gill, Untitled (9), from photo series Acts of Appearance, 2015– ongoing. Archival pigment print (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Copyright Gauri Gill. Image Courtesy of Gauri Gill and James Cohan, New York

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to the discussion on the in/visibility of BD and the medium specific quality of photographs to reveal aspects of a subject through a friction of absence and presence, precisely by showing us what is not represented and what is represented in its frame. In Untitled (9), three masked figures appear to be in an otherwise staid hospital room dominated by walls filled with text in bright red, green, and blue. At center right of the frame appears a figure in a sari laying on a metal high table, their oversized mask resembling an old person resting on a blanket that serves as a makeshift pillow. The mask’s wide eyes direct the person’s surprised facial expression to something above and its mouth sits agape, as if gasping in the same direction while its ear, nestled in the persons hand, opens up toward the ground. In contrast, the second figure, standing barefoot at the center in a plaid shirt and khakis, dons a gray rat mask with tiny pebble eyes, and looks on at the patient as it carefully seems to adjust their pillow from behind. Standing to the far left, is another figure in a sari, whose space is compositionally demarcated from the other two by an IV pole stand for the patient. This person, whose mask is painted with a lighter skin tone and a younger human face, seems oblivious to the others as it adjusts a bag on the pole with two hands. Their peripheral stance allows one to see that their mask is not fully covering their head, and that something else may be at play underneath. And because the mask’s facial expression is difficult to fully decode, one wonders what is going on inside or behind the surface, where the viewer cannot readily see or listen to the wearer’s emotions. Although we are confronted with a hospital scene, why the patient is there or what they are being treated for remains unspoken; this in turn brings doubts about who should be read as patient, caregiver, and witness. For other cases, such as documentary or stock medical images, this might be delineated by protective uniforms, patient gowns, or the presence of hospital equipment. Here, everyone seems to be wearing whatever their daily outfits might be. This seemingly simple choice begins to collapse the hierarchal representation and power dynamic between healthcare worker and patient and can contest institutionalized definitions and knowledge that uphold the boundaries not only between physically visible and mentally invisible forms of illness, but also involving the social, economic, cultural, and spiritual ways of interpreting them. Amar Annus’s study of the Marduk–Ea incantation structure and the self in spiritual experiences shows how a “decentring” between patient and healer, or activation of an in-between moment when both parties are divested of their executive powers, can enable placebo responses as a potential health resource and

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expands ideas of the complex interaction of biological and psychosocial factors between the mind and the body (2020, 2495). For the patient in Gill’s image, one wonders if they arrived there on their own terms for a physical ailment, or have they been involuntarily hospitalized or committed for a perceived BD episode? Such questioning can begin to problematize contrasting views on how patients are guided from “abnormal” to “normal” mental health and the roles of institutions and workers in this process. While the scale and features of the human masks are exaggerated and the transhuman-like rat cleverly alters the scene, they also blur with the realistic and familiar hospital details around them. Interestingly, this blurring effect offers various interpretations or states of the self (as unstable, dynamic, and deeper than the visible) in mental illness. It asks if we are meant to observe multiple and distinct figures in a singular act or are these figures representative of multiple acts of a single self. A wider social acceptance of this mask role-playing process could open up important psychological, epistemic, and ontological questions of visibility. It is evident that BD is not a totalizing or final picture of people that it afflicts. Moreover, visibility and acceptance of the rat figure beyond signification or metaphor permits a plurality of ways of being, as an aesthetic, psychosomatic, or ritual which can expand conceptions of the self in the midst of reductive diagnostic criteria and treatment systems. As Gallun writes: “the masks of the Jawhar village community confirm that meaningful experiences or aspects of identity are not always readily visible” (2018, 3). Gill’s Untitled (9), read through the concepts of in/visibility, permit an individual complexity that could meaningfully reframe BD, in particular for individuals as they are experiencing cycles of different episodes. Coupling how the mask empowers and transforms one’s capacity to act, such an experimental framework can also open pathways for embracing creativity during extreme mood episodes of depression and mania. With a similar feel, but in a different context and previously unforeseen process, the Adivasi’s masks and performances in Gill’s Acts of Appearance establish roles that photography can play in BD experiences while both disavowing and revealing spatial/temporal modes of being.

Adivasi Masks: Thresholds of Spatiality/Temporality The notion of space has been intensely scrutinized throughout human history not only for wayfinding purposes, but also in challenges across empirical disciplines. For example, during the mid to late 1800s, many

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Western scientists researched the psychology (e.g., sensation, intuition, and conception) of space through organisms’ perception of it (Dolins and Mitchell 2010, 35). For this chapter, I consider topological space, being one of the most general constructions of space, as drawing attention to non-Western forms and organizations of visual space. Kurt Lewin combined the value of topological spatial thinking in psychology with the notion of “life space” (1936). Although his work has been criticized for some mathematical shortcomings (Householder 1939), it is seen as generative by Skowron and Wójtowicz for qualitative, epistemically significant applications in the areas of explanation, explication, and metaphor, as well as for new perspectives on how “mathematical concepts can be applied to an otherwise seemingly non-mathematizable approach in psychology” (2021). Other scholars investigated qualitative spatial reasoning and geographical information systems by concentrating on the cognitive representation of topological knowledge—an issue historically ignored in psychological research (Knauff et al. 1997, 195). In addition, Knauff et al. note that spatial relations in everyday contexts are on some level topological and that despite psychological research concerned with such relations—which have a direct equivalent in natural language (i.e., the semantics of left, right, above, below, before, behind)—results from their study in computer science support the assumption that “topological spatial concepts are represented in our mind and have a causal power in a number of cognitive processes even if there is no direct translation into natural language expressions” (196). In an effort to understand the meaning of space throughout Gill’s images and BD experiences, this section focuses on the non-hierarchical possibilities of space as a verb, a bending, toward an inside-out thinking of “spatiality,” undoing the word as a preposition, noun, adjective, or exclusively mathematical concern. Reflections on how spatialities can be openly constructed via emotional representation or processes of topological knowledge attempt to argue that such visual, language-free spatialities can become affective forms of extending ideas of the self. Can images when combined with Adivasi masked performances untether normative spatio-temporal coordinates of the senses and recenter other geometries through aesthetic subjectivity? Can they give rise to a space that is not simply Euclidean or designed, but one endowed with the meanings and emotions it produces—one that can offer accessible image practices to cope with cultural, social, and economic realities? This section maps spatiality (space), temporality (time), and spatiality/temporality (space-time) in relation to the specific theoretical and

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practical ways that images construct and reconstruct cultural, social, and psychological frames of reference, imaginaries, and realities of the self. The spatiality/temporality which is constructed and reconstructed by images of Adivasi masks and performance invites us to reclaim the many formulations of spatiality/temporality in the self with the practical realities of transcultural approaches to South Asian mental health and BD. Considering the pragmatic realities of deinstitutionalizing mental health in South Asia, is it possible to imagine through Gill’s images a transcultural framework that does not seek to measure or account for space and time in ways that reproduces stigma, social conflict, and alienation? The Adivasi masks in Gill’s Acts of Appearance, as their own kind of object-event and persona, meld with their wearers to generate multiple spatial/temporal realities—a set of experiences that feel childlike, playful, and, at the same time, quietly anarchic. Since the masks are not presented exclusively as resting sculpture, they gain a different potency not only through their use as communal objects, but also in their distribution and circulation as images. Since one cannot walk around, touch, or wear the masks, while their entire performance is distilled in a two-dimensional photographic plane, they generate multiple spatialities/temporalities, in particular through their interchangeability among wearers and acts that we imagine happening before or after, within or without image borders. Another compelling aspect of Gill’s images is the pastoral atmosphere, which frames activity around the Adivasi villages. Reviewing the 35 photos that Gill presents as excerpts from the series on her website and another set presented in the 2021 exhibition A Time to Play: New Scenes from Acts of Appearance at James Cohan Gallery in New York, Untitled (89) and Untitled (76) stood out for their affinity with concepts of spatiality/temporality, as well as links to what historian Shailaja Paik refers to as “performing precarity” (2021) in the politics of caste, gender, and sexuality of Tamasha or street theater from the state of Maharashtra. The masks in Gill’s Untitled (76) perform unlike other images in the series (Fig. 8.2). Collapsing and abstracting linear constructions of spatiality/temporality through photography, two figures in saris, one as the driver and the other as the passenger, pave their own path into the frame. The presence of their white off-road style jeep, nearly outsizing the ceramic tile and corrugated steel roofed building behind it, looks as if it could be at rest or rolling forward at the same time. Adding some irony to the scene, the backseat passenger wears a mask in the form of a yellow and white clock complete with a wide-open mouth, red lips and delicately

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Fig. 8.2  Gauri Gill, Untitled (76), from photo series Acts of Appearance, 2015– ongoing.  Archival pigment print (40.6 x 61 cm). Copyright Gauri Gill. Image Courtesy of Gauri Gill and James Cohan, New York

painted hour, minute, and second hands displaying a time of around 11:55 between two eyes. Behind the dial, or a clock’s face, the movement is known as the engine that drives the time, which is typically not visible to the viewer. The intricate nesting of the mask wearer traveling through the village in a jeep while possessing their own clock (e.g., biological, circadian, subjective, etc.) as both the movement (invisible) and the face (visible), begs the question: how does one tell time in the image? Who keeps it and where? The clock’s mouth, with a joker’s smile resembling the talismanic facial expressions of anthropomorphic hard wood sculptures and effigies in the Karnali Basin of Nepal (Goy 2009), points to a make-believe dream-time, one that does not bracket itself as contemporary or fit inside the spatio-temporal logic sustaining modernity/coloniality, but the “relational time” of Indigenous thought and enactments of decolonial aesthesis (Vázquez and Barrera Contreras 2016), a topological glimmer of time which can abandon certainties through mischief and subjectivity. Or, as put succinctly by the Indigenous Peoples of Kanaky: “Eux, ils ont des montres, nous, on a le temp,” which writer Léopold Lambert translates as

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“They Have Clocks, We Have Time,” and which can be interpreted across multiple contexts as refusal of the temporal scale of colonialism on stolen lands (2021, 17). If in a single image, the passenger in a clock mask gazing back at the camera transgresses static representations of time, the driver wearing a green and yellow spotted snake mask further problematizes it by reappearing, or a shedding of its skin so to speak, throughout multiple images in the series. Thierry de Duve’s essay Time Exposure and Snapshot (2007) provides further insight into how the spatial and temporal dimensions of images can both sculpt psychological responses and map to states of mania and depression. Fading past and present with different visual layers, de Duve’s hypothetical model is relevant for thinking through this paradox, in particular the photograph’s “double branching of temporality” (1) as the snapshot or the present tense, which is “always too early to see the event occur at the surface, and always too late to witness its happening in reality” (2), and the time exposure or the past tense, which “would freeze in a sort of infinitive, and offer itself as the empty form of all potential tenses” (2007, 114). De Duve locates the paradox of space and time in the photograph in psychological terms or in “the realm of Stimmung, or mood,” which is also “the terrain in which aesthetic experience, especially visual, is nurtured,” arguing how on a pre-symbolic, unconscious level our process of dealing with the photograph results in “an unresolved oscillation between two opposite libidinal positions: the manic and the depressive” (2007, 121). While de Duve’s mapping of the photograph’s “the manic-depressive vector” in relation to the “didactic opposition of snapshot and time exposure” (2007, 122) offers a rich theoretical description for understanding space and time for the beholder or witness, it remains unclear precisely where this could play a role for those experiencing BD and it is silent on the intersecting cultural constructions of space-time through the lenses of caste, race, and gender. Making images, in contrast to consuming and witnessing images, can offer additional affordances. How does one move through the space-time of a manic or depressive episode? And do images offer a way to begin visualizing or articulating when the moods are present, began or ended, in particular if they cannot be adequately measured in sequential or hierarchical evidence-based stages by psychology? Gill’s images show how one can ground oneself not only in the space-time of here (formerly, now and there), but also in the vitality of performing different selves through masks. Moreover, in the context of understanding complex episodes of BD, for example involving psychosis,

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there can be an acute loss of a sense of self. When psychological terms and practices can seem moralizing, dispassionate, or influenced by scientism, image-making practices offer a subjective ground for questioning views through nonverbal forms of expression. Commenting on the difference between mask and sculpture, Boada, a mask-maker with the Peruvian Yuyachkani street theater collective, impressively identifies how an actor’s masked performance spawns images in space which invoke a society through facial expression (Bell et al. 1999, 180). What could a mask, as involving an image-making process along the line of Boada, catalyze for patients during or after extreme mood periods? By stretching the perceived space and time between mania or depression experiences, can the mask open up a reality, an image of the self that is not foreclosed by normative ideas of BD cycles? Gill’s artist statement in Acts of Appearance mentions that the Adivasi community was commissioned to make masks with varied rasas in mind. Given the stoic feel of most of the human and animal-like faces, it is difficult instantly to see embodiments or glimpses of rasas in their facial expressions. Instead, their expansive scale, texture, and patina command a deeper, vibrant emotion. For the figures in Untitled (76), the feeling conveyed through the two animal-like masks elevate an otherwise mundane scene, but when information about the wearers or makers from the Adivasi community remains invisible, how should we react to their overall performance in each image? When the masks dominate the frame as in Untitled (76), some level of interior complexity and bodily presence of the wearer seems absent. Beyond body language or clothing choices, the presence of the mask almost absorbs or surpasses that of the wearer when rendered or flattened from its original 3D shape, as it might be experienced in a live performance, to the scaled down 2D plane of the image. But in Boada’s experience “the mask is not, finally, the material form but the corporeal form of the character” (Bell et al. 1999, 178). At the bedrock, the masks as objects in Gill’s images have potential as an activation site of multiple spatialities/temporalities with the examples discussed herein. Sifting through other layers of the image reveal that some verbal or nonverbal cues could shed additional light on the wearer’s ability to set into motion different forms of space. The Adivasi masked performance has aesthetic merit on its own, and yet something else outside of the photographing of it is worth recovering, namely the communal process of making the masks and the conditions allowing the wearers to be multiple selves—selves constructed and symbolized across different social spaces and times as fluid, world-­building, or liberatory.

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Coda What can the images do today, in their representation, epistemologies, and circulation within multiple colonialities of the photographic gaze—for the witness, and, more importantly, for the Adivasi? In the context of the shamanic artistic imaginary of eco-cosmological knowledge systems, Gill’s images bare resemblance to Carrin and Guzy’s anthropological analysis of painting motifs by The Pradhan Gond artists of the Amarkantak, Madhya Pradesh region (2020). Given these thematic similarities, my reading of Gill’s work is differentiated on the less common registers of in/visibility and spatiality/temporality, and also inquires about the roles of photography in and out of Adivasi artistic practices. In particular, Gill’s staged images, of Adivasis shapeshifting with and through masks between divergent views of self-understanding, consciousness, and emotions, can be perceived as an example for potentially reframing BD experiences. Many complex aesthetic, ethical, political, and economic questions remain open about the application of images and masked performances in a transcultural psychotherapeutic commons approach. Over time, further research and artistic experimentation into overlaps with these areas may provide additional insights for South Asian mental healthcare options. In addition, despite growing inclusion of Adivasi visual art and practices, they are vulnerable to co-optation, to new Orientalism through global art commercialization and deterritorialization, as in the tragic story of Jangarh Singh Shyam, and this is why questions of re-presentation remain critical (Guzy 2016, 41–42). Such caste norms and atrocities, which can psychologically limit individual and group agency, exist across academic and artistic production, as well as among mental health care settings. If individuals are not harming themselves or others, meaningful responses to South Asian mental health and BD could begin by accepting that such individuals genuinely can have different selves in order to deal with or be in the world— such as in/visible, here and now, then and there, manic and depressed— without deceptive intent. This chapter has been an effort from within visual culture to sift through the vocabulary of Gill’s Acts of Appearance in order to interpret their coherence and connectivity to emotional and social benefits in BD experiences. The role of Adivasi masks and rituals in and out of aesthetics was emphasized and situated amidst a backdrop of various mental health theories and practices with a call to increase access and understanding via transcultural paradigms. A preliminary ethics on agency and artistic subjectivity

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was considered necessary for applying photography’s reparative and destigmatizing potential to South Asian mental health outside the confines of socially accepted forms of psychiatry. Aligned with a politics of care, the Adivasi’s masked performances in Gill’s images question individual authorship and the social role of art. One such role, seen through IP, underscores the links between selves and wider social selves in rupturing methods of isolation and hierarchical control of BD experiences. The analysis attempted to show why Gill’s images with the Adivasis, as a poetic foil, sheds light on BD in ways that mental health care workers cannot: she visualizes emotions through direct perception and personal experience as a photographer, making worlds where dreamlike spirits, beings, animals, and humans can coexist as both the subject and the object of multiple and hybrid selves. Therefore, Acts of Appearance, weaving masks with ritual, performance, and Adivasi voice in everyday life, can be read time split from time, space split from space—as a photographic index for understanding how layers of the self are concealed and revealed in BD experiences. In this reckoning, such a transgressive index complicates and expands the boundaries of in/visibility and spatiality/temporality with Adivasi mask performances while simultaneously blurring what is perceived as here and now with then and there. Can I face the changes, mental health or otherwise, in my friend or my selves without tempering the fire? With an ear to the ground, listening for a dadariya of loss and love, to create with, to see with, I need to move together with you through the irreducible vibration between self and other, the heard and the imagined.

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PART IV

Images Mediating Between Two Worlds

CHAPTER 9

Photographic Visions of Mentally Disordered Perceptual Experiences: Disruptions in Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s Psychosomatic Imagery Helen Westgeest

The many visual representations of people with mental disorders make us easily overlook that these images invite spectators to look at the portrayed “Other,” rather than encourage contemplation about how they perceive the world. Among the artists who have shown in their work to be aware of this deficiency, the Swiss photographer Matthieu Zellweger has drawn my particular attention. His leporello-format photobook Worlds Beyond (2019) is based on interviews and research related to these kinds of experiences. His background as a scientist in the field of health and medicine

H. Westgeest (*) Departments of Media Studies and Art History, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_9

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grounded this visual research.1 In this chapter, I discuss several pictures from this photobook in juxtaposition with three photographs by Lauren E. Simonutti. This American photographer produced many photo-series representing deviated perceptions of herself and her environment. According to the artist, a disorder of perceptual experiences “strips things down to their core. … and [offers] the occasional ability to see things that are not there” (2011). What the digital photographs by Zellweger and analog photographs by Simonutti have in common is that they draw attention not to distorted facial expressions, but to disrupted experiences of the world, which brings spectators closer to those perceptual moments of “other” perceptions. As artworks, these pictures are intended to be presented to the general public, among whom many will somehow recognize the referenced experiences. Rather than diagnosing the perspective on the outside world provided in the images by Simonutti and Zellweger, my argument focuses on how both artists use photography’s ability to produce psychosomatic imagery, in order to turn our way of looking at mental disorders around. As a result, I do not address photography as a transparent medium in the first place (even though both artists clearly utilize this commonly accepted quality), but as a medium with particular qualities to act as an “intermediary” of psychosomatic perceptual experiences. To develop this chapter’s case-­ studies, I make use of three intermediary strategies: I examine the photograph as reflection of multiple perceptual experiences, as veil between two worlds, and as disturbed interaction due to disruptive frames. My central question is how some philosophical views on deviated perception can be related to disturbances in photographs in order to provide insights into how the selected images discuss disrupted visual experiences.

Photographic and Deviating Perceptions as Theoretical Framework Photography can be characterized as “looking through the eyes of someone else,” if one considers the lens of the camera as a replacement of the eye of the maker of the image. Early attempts of fixing images in the camera obscura by Nicéphore Niépce in the 1810s were called “retinas” 1  As explained by Zellweger (2021): “I hold a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering” and “worked as a research scientist on health issues,” and “this impacts the way I go about preparing photo projects, finding articles and documentation.”

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by the inventor, to emphasize the similarity with the eye as optical instrument. Over time, it became clear that the functioning of a camera lens hardly had anything in common with that of the human eye (Geimer 2018, 170). Moreover, photography was increasingly regarded as a reflection of the photographer’s vision of the world. Nonetheless, showing photographs to someone is quite often considered a gesture of “look, this is what I saw,” in the meaning of “this was my perceptual experience.” This is also the invitation offered by Simonutti’s and Zellweger’s photographs by means of, respectively, the artist’s own perceptual experience and a reconstruction of someone else’s experience. The latter relates as well to the known reconstructions of perceptual experiences in the case of portraits of criminals created by the police on the basis of descriptions by victims, who will be asked: “is this what you saw?” This means that photography is capable not only to record the world before the camera, but also to reconstruct perceptions experienced in the past or by others. To ground my visual analysis of Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s photographs in scholarly research in the field of perceptual experiences, in particular regarding the deviation of normativity of perception due to mental disorders, this chapter will draw on the volume Normativity in Perception (2015), edited by Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer. These editors argue that if norms play a decisive role in the vast majority of our practices, the same can be said about perception. One’s perception is normative in being self-aware and in correcting the belief about how things are when new facts contradict one’s original view (Doyon and Breyer 2015, 43–44). For people suffering from mental health problems, the delusional content becomes a kind of “norm” that is valid only for themselves (Doyon and Breyer 2015, 2). For the present volume’s focus on psychosomatic imagery, it is interesting that the authors of Normativity in Perception—as philosophers who embrace a phenomenological approach—pay profound attention to the role of bodily involvement in perception. Importantly, they do not intend to consider aberrations of normativity as “abnormal” perceptions, a view to which I subscribe as well in this contribution. In this respect, David Morris, for instance, emphasizes that illusions, rather than involving mistaken perceptions, are cases in which perceived objects make a different kind of sense. In line with this view, Morris aims to reconsider the relation between “normal” and “illusory” perceptions: “The real lesson of illusions is that there are no inviolable norms of perception, because norms are born of temporality as the reality of change” (Morris 2015, 89). Similarly,

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Maren Wehrle (2015, 131) asks the intriguing question: “Why do we believe in an objective world that is accessible for everyone, when we only have direct evidence of our own experience?” She problematizes the link of abnormality to an overall frame of normal experience, because any conception of “normality” is preliminary and always open to disruptions and breakdowns. Abnormality, she argues, “lies at the heart of the concept of normality itself.” The interruptions of experience make us aware of the ways our experience operates and the implicit assumptions inherent in every perception (Wehrle 2015, 137–138). If the authors of Normativity in Perception discuss disturbed perceptual experiences from a philosophical perspective and barely address visual representations, art historian Peter Geimer delves into the history of failed and disrupted photographs in Inadvertent Images (2018). Geimer intends to demonstrate that technical accidents he found in historical photographs can offer fascinating insights into the nature of the medium and how it works. He even argues that the history of photographic representations goes hand in hand with a parallel “history of contaminations, disturbances, and destructions.” As a result, he doubts the existence of something like a “normal” case of photographic recording (Geimer 2018, 34 and 55). Although he relies on nineteenth-century examples to back up his arguments about deviating photographs, some of the paradoxes he discusses are certainly valuable for my more recent case-studies, in which disruptions are included as intended aspects. Because most of the modes of seeing addressed in this chapter are blurred in various ways, Wolfgang Ullrich’s study of blurred images and Simone Natale’s essay on spirit photography offer a helpful framework as well. In each of the next three sections, a photograph from Worlds Beyond will be discussed in juxtaposition with a photograph by Simonutti, created in the last five years before her untimely death. In general, this chapter develops from a first section about contracted perceptual fields (too much visibility) due to mental disorders, via a section focusing on withdrawal from being seen by the external world, to the last section concerning disrupted expanded and interactive perceptual fields.

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The Photograph as Reflection of Multiple Perceptual Experiences The first two photographs present compressions of views of inside and outside worlds, even though they do so in different ways (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). In Matthieu Zellweger’s picture (Fig. 9.1a), we see both the silhouettes of façades of buildings and the interior of a room. What may look as a double-­ exposure photograph appears to be a straight photograph through a window in the evening, when the interior space reflects onto the mirroring window, which results in a compressed image of the world behind and in front of the photographer (Zellweger 2021). In the photobook Worlds Beyond, this image is placed in between two mirrored and upside-down copies of it (Fig. 9.1b). As commented by Zellweger: The “Worlds Beyond” are confused und undefined, strange and very familiar. … they represent uncontrolled or irrational situations, with little in common with “reality” as understood by most people during the daytime or outside any psychiatric condition. Thus, these images are a tribute to the creativity of the brain, rooted in our deepest fears or wildest aspirations, a product of imagination let loose and unconstrained by daily inhibitions, as a result of any possible cause (pathological or otherwise). (Zellweger 2019, unpaged)

Fig. 9.1  (a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

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Fig. 9.2  Lauren E.  Simonutti, Cornered, 2011. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago

Differently, if also somehow similar, Lauren E.  Simonutti’s photograph Cornered (Fig. 9.2) displays a hallway with closed doors. We are looking at a kind of self-portrait of the artist, but where is she standing? In the hallway as a transparent ghost, as a projection on the wall, or on both sides of a translucent wall? Like in Zellweger’s picture, the compression makes the spectator’s attention move back and forth, from outside to inside. How does this switch between outside and inside and the compression of perceptual experiences in the photographs relate to concurrence between perceptual experiences of the imagination and the direct frontal view of the physical world? In this section, theoretical thoughts on distorted perception by the philosophers Matthew Ratcliffe and Arnaud Dewalque will be related to views on manipulated spirit photography by media scholar

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Simone Natale to provide insights into how the use of photography as a medium can be understood in a metaphoric way in the selected photographs. How do perceiving and imagining differ? According to Dewalque, in his essay “The Normative Force of Perceptual Justification,” the discrimination of actual presence is stronger than assumed differences in content or intensity. This is called “sense of reality” or “feeling of presence,” where the perceptual attitude is guided by a normative force of perceptual justification (2015, 193). His view sounds convincing for common situations of direct perception, but less so in cases of photographic disturbed perceptions. To deal with this difference, Ratcliffe’s perspective is more productive. In “How is Perceptual Experience Possible? The Phenomenology of Presence and the Nature of Hallucination,” Ratcliffe discusses unusual or disturbed perceptual experiences by analyzing symptoms of hallucinations. Psychopathologies may disrupt experiences, resulting in blurred modes of intentionality, such as perception, remembering, imagination, et cetera, which may lead to delusional states of mind. Through this lens, Ratcliffe deals with the concept of presence in a slightly different way than Dewalque. Ratcliffe focuses on the perceived entity as an encounter in here and now, “regardless of whether or not what seems to be present is actually present.” These disturbances could be caused by various circumstances, such as illness, jetlag, sleep deprivation. This means that anyone may experience such subtle changes every now and then: “a sense of presence might be somehow lacking from perceptual experience, or one’s imaginations might be somehow perception-like” (Ratcliffe 2015, 91–94; 2017, 44–45). Ratcliffe’s interest, therefore, mainly concerns those delusions and hallucinations which are not quite real and not fully present. These involvements can be considered to comprise a so-called double bookkeeping, when someone experiences two overlapping realities: a kind of world of consensus, as well as a phenomenon of delusion and hallucination, which to some extent remain separate. This means, that in “double bookkeeping” there are still capacities for facing familiar kinds of perception, imagination, memory, et cetera, even if slightly different ones. Although a weakening of the distinction between different intentional states takes place, it is not a matter of complete collapse: “the person still believes or imagines; she just doesn’t know which” (Ratcliffe 2015, 103–106). The assumption of reduced and disrupted discrepancy between perceiving, remembering, and imagining led Ratcliffe to the conclusion that the term

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“presence,” which apparently has both spatial and temporal connotations, would therefore be more appropriate than the term “hereness” (2015, 109–110). I note here an interesting parallel with one of Zellweger’s statements in his photobook: “This series opens a door to worlds known to one person only, at one moment only” (Zellweger 2019, unpaged). The concepts of “double bookkeeping” and “compressed presence” can be most literally translated to the effect of multiple compressed views in Simonutti’s and Zellweger’s photographs, even though the latter are just “one click” shots. At this stage, it is interesting to switch our attention to Simone Natale’s study on spirit photography, and in particular her argument on the paradoxical use of photography (2016, 137–138). Natale foremost intends to demonstrate the deep interconnection between consumerism and religious beliefs in how spirit photography was interpreted and used in the late nineteenth century. In her conclusion, she includes an interesting reflection on paradoxes in perception of manipulated photographs. Spirit photography was invented in the 1860s to support the belief of spiritualists in the presence of the ghosts of dead people. Some really believed in it, others liked the trick of these double-exposure or combined printed photographs. Natale notes that these images of ghosts were contradictory to the common status of the photographic image as truthful recording of reality, but the claims of mechanical objectivity and indexicality of the photographic medium would have strengthened spiritualists’ reasons for the use of this technology. Because of these various uses and interpretations of the medium of photography, Natale concludes that “spirit photography was an open field in which realistic and fictional interpretations of images coexisted and interacted with each other” (169). This observation of nineteenth-century spirit photography is surprisingly well applicable to Simonutti’s photographs. Simonutti (2012a) has even explicitly mentioned spirit photography as a source of inspiration for some of her photographs which are quite similar to Cornered: “There is a book The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult with a tremendous selection of spirit photographs. (Best one, Mary Todd in widows weeds with the ghost of her beloved Abe Lincoln).” This spirit photograph is also included in Natale’s book (2016, 139). We should not overlook that Natale deals with spirit photography related to esoteric spiritualism, whereas Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s pictures deal with deviated perception. The search for a way to characterize the atmosphere in my case-studies led me to Ratcliffe’s reference to “delusional atmosphere” (or “delusional mood”), coined by Karl Jaspers in

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1963. Jaspers considers delusional atmosphere as a phenomenological disturbance, allied to “pre-psychotic stages of schizophrenia, where everything seems somehow different, not right, not quite there in the way it once was.” As a result, it encompasses the overall structure and character of perception, rather than particular contents: [P]erception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light. A living-­ room which formerly was felt as neutral or friendly now becomes dominated by some indefinable atmosphere. Something seems in the air which the patient cannot account for, a distrustful, uncomfortable, uncanny tension invades him. (Jaspers quoted by Ratcliffe 2017, 109)

This means that the delusional atmosphere does not concern changes in perceived properties. The person involved is able to list everything observed, but the paradox is that nothing has changed and everything has changed (Ratcliffe 2017, 108–110). The mood in Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s photographs can certainly be characterized as a delusional atmosphere, including the strange light and the abovementioned paradox. The strange light in their photographs most often results from reduced light or even darkness, in combination with artificial spotlights, and, in the case of Zellweger, a (couple of) flashlight(s). The blurredness resulting from the multiple views compressed in one image in fact strengthens the delusional atmosphere. Theoretical reflections on distorted perception by Ratcliffe (such as double bookkeeping) have offered the useful concept of compressed perceptual presence. Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s above-discussed photographs present overlapping realities, which are distinguishable, but they also merge. The confusion in both photographs about what is inside and what is outside, and about what is direct perception of the world and representation of imaginative worlds, may as well act as a metaphor for confused experiences of outside and inside worlds during mental lapses. In line with the view that perception and photographs both frame “presence,” doors and windows can be said to emphasize the act of framing. This observation will be discussed more in-depth in the next section.

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The Photograph as a Veil Between Two Worlds A lace curtain obstructs a clear view through a window onto some building blocks along an almost empty courtyard (Fig. 9.3a). This photograph shows the view of a patient from a closed psychiatric unit, locked up in the psychiatric ward as well as in their own pathology (Zellweger 2021). This photograph is repeated seventeen times in two columns in Zellweger’s photobook Worlds Beyond (Fig. 9.3b), as calendar of identical days. The images are accompanied by the text: “You so learned made up your mind I must abide. The courtyard my horizon. That label granted. Forever. I am locked up within.”2 The dark corners in the photograph strengthen the impression of looking through a peephole. The act of peeping through is even more explicit in Simonutti’s photograph Invisible (Fig. 9.4). The artist hides herself behind two cloths with an opening in between through which she looks at the camera. In both photographs the view is largely obstructed. Since its invention, the medium photography has been promoted as a highly transparent medium, for its mechanically produced images which do not include any intervention of an artist’s hand (Van Gelder and Westgeest 2011). The

Fig. 9.3  (a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

2  Zellweger (2021): “As for the texts, they are entirely my creations, but obviously the time I spent with patients and psychiatrists discussing the workings of a bipolar crisis have nourished my imagination when I wrote them.”

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Fig. 9.4  Lauren E.  Simonutti, Invisible, 2007. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago

printed result of the view through the lens was regarded to be similar to experiencing a clear view of the distanced world through a window. But what happens when the transparent view is obstructed by a curtain or veil? An evident consequence is that the curtain or veil emphasizes the presence of “a something in between two worlds.” Interestingly, in the pictures discussed in this section, the cloth coincides with the surface of the photograph. In general, the surface of the analog photograph is similarly positioned in between the beholder and the subject “embedded” in the photographic paper. The knowledge that both artists were interested in disrupted perceptual experiences, then, turns the photographic surface

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into a “veil” between two worlds—if not a lock between the inner and outer world of the “protagonist.” This observation makes one wonder which philosophical views on deviated perceptual experiences may further elucidate these veiled photographs. The main concepts from perception theories addressed in this section include associations with a veiled world which sets things apart. This implies that my focus on the relationship between photography and semi-visibility or blurredness actually comes down to a reverse approach of the common view on photography as medium of visibility. The transparency of perception is no longer a critical concern as such. Hardly anyone believes in the “innocent eye” anymore. Perception is mediated in one way or another. But in which ways or to what extent is still an ongoing discussion of course. Some theorists stress the social aspect of visibility, because it determines perceptual normativity. Thiemo Breyer’s essay on “Social Visibility and Perceptual Normativity” (2015) focuses on the importance of interactional space of seeing and being seen, where attention is directed as well as withdrawn. In my case-studies here, the social visibility is obstructed. The spectator of Zellweger’s photograph takes the position of someone in front of the curtain, being invisible for the outside world and blocked from interpersonal social space, while positioned in the dark. Simonutti’s image is even more complicated, because the artist—whose eyes we see in the opening in the cloth surrounded by darkness—seems to hide from us and the camera, which also results in an obstructed interpersonal social space. As discussed in the previous section, Ratcliffe is highly interested in disrupted perceptions. As he quotes a personal experience by a psychologist (2017, 44): [L]ack of sleep reduces the feeling of reality; so too, in even greater degree, does muscular fatigue of the eyes. … At such times the external world seems to lack solidity … consciousness of self ebbs … The haze of an autumn day makes objects seem far-off, … veiled ….

The curtain and cloth in the photographs literally turn objects far-off, distanced, and veiled. Since they merge with the surface of the photographs, what is the consequence of looking at the (semi-)opaque surface, rather than through it? If we long used to ignore the surfaces of photographs, these two photographs invite reflection on their blurred nature. Looking at a blurred image is quite similar to looking through a

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steamed-­up window, walking through mist, or experiencing a haze before one’s eyes. Blurredness in photography may result from multiple exposure, movement, a blurred subject, or out of focus recording. For my case-­ studies it is more relevant to address the complicated issue of representation related to blurredness, rather than its cause. In Die Geschichte der Unschärfe [The history of blurredness], art historian and media philosopher Wolfgang Ullrich wonders why blurredness is appreciated as an aesthetic quality, because it is equally considered as failure (2002/2009, 8). He concludes that blurred images have turned into certain image conventions. In particular in cinema, memory images and dream or imaginary images are presented as blurred, even though there is no scientific consensus of this quality. It is interesting to realize, according to Ullrich, the apparent selfevidence of the relationship of blurredness with mental issues (2002/2009, 102–103). Moreover, if sharp images are often associated with rational and scientific precision, blurred ones rather seem to evoke emotions or a certain distance and enigma (2002/2009, 18, 26). With regard to the abovementioned relation between blurredness, mental disorders, and the notion of distancing, it is relevant to point out that the relationship between distance and mental disorder has a long history. In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault describes the history of dealing with insanity in Europe and relates his observations to sociopolitical developments in the so-called Age of Reason. He notes that madness used to be hidden in daily life, but that in the seventeenth century it became “visible,” when madness became entwined with the practice of locking up people: [I]f present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself. (Foucault 1965/1988, 70)

Foucault literally refers to the space behind bars in the windows of the asylum. In contrast, Zellweger’s photograph offers a reverse inside-out perspective, one not through bars but through a lace curtain. In this respect, Simonutti’s photograph is more complex, because she presents herself as if “locked” behind the cloth, while at the same time she represents—being in control of the camera—the look at herself. What kind of space is suggested behind the cloth in this photograph and in front of the curtain in the other picture?

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The “otherness” of these spaces, and their being real as well as unreal, reminds me of the term “heterotopia.” In 1967, six years after the publication of Madness and Civilization (originally published in French in 1961), Foucault introduced in his lecture on “Des Espaces Autres” [On Other Places] the concept of “heterotopia.” After a general reflection on how experiences and classifications of places changed through the ages, he claims to be interested in sites and particular those sites “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” He identifies two main types: utopias and heterotopias, mainly elaborating the latter. Each civilization, he argues, will have places that somehow function as “counter-sites”: these places are outside of all places, even though their real location can be clearly indicated (Foucault 1986, 24). Specifically, in today’s world, he identifies “heterotopias of deviation,” where people with deviant behavior are isolated, such as psychiatric hospitals. Even more relevant here is that the heterotopia juxtaposes several spaces in a single real place—sites that actually are incompatible. One of his examples is the movie theater’s two-­ dimensional screen on which a three-dimensional space is projected. A photograph is also a projection of what is in front of the camera onto the light sensitive material/sensors in the camera, and subsequently a projection on photo paper or a screen. The curtain and cloth in my case-studies, however, rather draw attention to themselves as screens and as border between two different kinds of places, a common space and a counter-site, a kind of self-created heterotopia of deviation and isolation, outside of all places, but still an identifiable location (Foucault 1986, 25–26). Moreover, if we consider looking into the lens of the camera as looking into the mirror, and, conversely, the camera as providing a mirror of the world, Simonutti’s Invisible can be linked to Foucault’s observation about heterotopia’s relation to the mirror. From the standpoint of the mirror, according to Foucault, I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. … The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Foucault 1986, 24)

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Perceptual experiences of distance—as described in this quote—are hardly unfamiliar. Almost anyone will have experienced this kind of moments, when you perceive yourself as a stranger in the mirror and the world as remote, rather than close by. If metaphors of windows and mirrors are usually deployed to emphasize transparency of photography or sight, when covered or semi-transparent they actually intensify the emphasis on deviation of common perceptual experience. Ratcliffe’s view on the results of obstruction of clear perceptual experiences provides insights into the role of the obstructed transparency in the two photographs discussed here. The tension between visibility and invisibility, and in particular the social (in)visibility on account of mental disorder, is expressed in the use of veiled windows and a peephole in the cloth partition, as also confirmed by Ullrich’s reflections on blurred pictures. Occlusion strengthens the lack of depth, lack of openness, lack of transparency, and the claustrophobic experience of space in the two photographs. Introjection seems more applicable here than forward projection to an outside, while Foucault’s arguments on the displacement of madness in the history of Western culture, as well as his description of the borders between common places and heterotopia, can be used to underpin the specific role of distanciation through curtains and cloth in these photographs.

Disturbed Interaction Due to Disruptive Frames The history of photography has been haunted from its very beginning … by a history of disruptions, of accidents and incidents. (Geimer 2018, 75–76)

This characterization of the history of photography by art historian Peter Geimer counterpoises common views on the history of photography as an ever more perfect mirror of the world. His statement evokes the question of whether this feature could also be translated to the normativity of perceptual experiences of the world in front of our eyes. Let us start with two photographs of spaces in which a woman is present, but who at the same time seems to try to escape that space (Figs. 9.5a and 9.6). In Zellweger’s picture, a woman with closed eyes already partly escapes the framed unidentified location. This woman, like Simonutti’s face in the other photograph, is directed toward a space outside the view of the spectator. Simonutti’s picture is part of the Birthday series produced over a period of several years. In 2006 she recorded herself the day before her birthday,

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Fig. 9.5  (a, b) Matthieu Zellweger, Worlds Beyond, 2019. Courtesy of the artist

accompanied by a birthday cake. According to the artist, the project addressed the people “who walked out of my life when they discovered that I was ill” (Simonutti 2010). She put the cake in the freezer, where she kept it for four years, and just before each next birthday she took a picture, after she had cut it a little more. The title Tomorrow is my birthday and I have tired of this room concerns anticipation; it resonates with Ratcliffe’s explanation of deviated perceptions through temporal connotations, which refer not only to memory images of the past, but also to the anticipatory character of the present. This includes an expectation of what might happen next, which means a sense of what is to come. In many cases, this involves “a feeling of suspiciousness, tension and foreboding that does not latch onto anything specific.” He describes this kind of anticipation as a sort of distrust that pervades experience, as if strolling through a dark forest: “nothing is taken for granted anymore. … there is an all-enveloping sense of something waiting or something coming… something indeterminate but menacing” (Ratcliffe 2015, 97–99). If the first section of this chapter dealt with contracted perceptual fields (too much visibility) due to mental disorders, while the second section delved into a withdrawal from being seen by the external world, this last section focuses on which insights the disrupted expanded and interactive perceptual fields provide. Theater and performance scholar Anna Harpin’s

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Fig. 9.6  Lauren E. Simonutti, Tomorrow is my birthday and I have tired of this room, 2010. © Lauren Simonutti courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago

Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness (2018) offers useful insights for this changed perspective through considering reality as “a performative, relational, and interpretive practice.” She wonders how a perception is generated, but also how it can be verified: “How do I know that you see what I see, hear what I hear? And does it matter if you don’t?” She suggests to think of reality not only as relational, but also as an always incomplete happenstance, and to consider disturbed perceptual encounters as creative acts which should be explored rather than reduced to symptoms to be cured (109–111). Her remark is also applicable to my case-studies, which rather seem to ask for understanding and respect than for help to be cured. Harpin’s intention—mainly exemplified by films—is to reframe psychotic expressions not as anomalous signs of malfunctioning, but as

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ordinary, if complicated, phenomena of emotional experiences (201). Even though my case-studies do not relate to psychosis, her intention to understand with (a “withness” as methodology, rather than looking at), is an inspiring perspective. If visual interacting means that looking is a social activity, obstructed visual interactions have severe consequences. In his contribution to Normativity of Perception, philosopher Michael Madary emphasizes that when we see our world, “we see a world that we share with other humans, engaged in particular cultural practices. This means that visual content also has a strong social element” (2015, 56). Even more specific, in “Seeing Things in the Right Way,” Shaun Gallagher scrutinizes how social interaction shapes perception. For my case-studies, it is elucidating to reverse this focus to how disrupted social interaction is visualized through the medium of photography by Zellweger and Simonutti. This means that I read Gallagher’s essay here “against the grain.” Gallagher, for instance, emphasizes the importance of looking at faces and interaction with them. He argues that when we face another person, we make eye contact in very subtle eye movements, and that affective responses support vision from the very moment that visual stimulation begins (2015, 126). In the case of Zellweger’s and Simonetti’s images, however, the spectator cannot make eye contact with the women in the photographs; their faces are directed toward the “outer-frame,” even if presumably toward nothing specific. In his photobook, Zellweger positioned this picture in between two other images of the same face, cut off in different ways and all with closed eyes, indicating a view to an inner world (Fig. 9.5b). Their undefined and absent looks actually make us realize that it is impossible to try to look through the eyes of someone else at the world. According to the artist, his intention was to visualize a nightmare in this photograph rather than a pathological status, even though both would have in common that “the brain loses control and the worst fears come alive” (Zellweger 2022). This remark agrees with Ratcliffe’s abovementioned view. Zellweger asked his interviewees to describe their manic phases in order to let him “into their mind” with his camera, a method of “withness” as proposed by Harpin. While they offered the images’ ingredients, the artist made the final pictures, and these were validated by his interviewees, who, according to the artist, recognized the spirit and mood of their crises in his pictures (Zellweger 2021). A selection was combined into a leporello format with a fragmented, disrupted, and irregular layout, including several seemingly repetitive images (some of them are included upside down, as

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in Figs. 9.1b and 9.3b). The leporello is printed on both sides and thus rewinds itself, according to the artist, “back to its start and in a way that never fully ends because it goes in circles (like a psychiatric crisis or a dream),” like a loop (Zellweger 2021). Very different from Zellweger’s practice, Geimer focuses on failures and disruptions caused by photographic techniques in nineteenth-century photography, but his reflections on how failures in photography make spectators more aware of mediation processes are certainly insightful for my case-studies. In one of his examples, Geimer problematizes the metaphor of the camera as an artificial eye. The camera is supposed to act like an eye, but it is entirely unlike the eye because it operates on the basis of its own capacities. Visualization techniques, such as photography, rather sharpen awareness of the fact that things might be dissimilar from how our senses perceive them. Nevertheless, Geimer admits that some other than technical characteristics are quite alike, for instance the use of the term “blind spot” to indicate that every observation inevitably implies that something else is ignored (2018, 139, 151). Even more specific, he quotes Hans Belting from Anthropology of Images, who defines photography as the “medium of the gaze”: [P]hotography reproduces the gaze that we cast upon the world, although we know that an unseeing camera; i.e., without gaze, has captured the image that we are seeing. … We cannot but take a photograph for the medium of a gaze—not, in the first instance, our gaze, but the gaze of the photographer, which transfers itself onto our own gaze when we stand before the finished picture. (Belting in Geimer, 184)

Simonutti’s and Zellweger’s photographs may be interpreted as even more complicated than mediating the gaze of the photographer; they present a perceptual experience. Part of Belting’s additional remark is striking in this case: “the pictures the camera renders are the products of ‘another gaze’. … It is expressly called the gaze of another.” As an example, Belting mentions photographs taken by cameras attached to pigeons. Geimer refers to them as a kind of view that nobody has ever seen, one that comes into being when someone looks at it, but a view undoubtably imaginable. In these cases, “a solitary viewer … transforms an unseeing record into a view” (2018, 184–185). Strikingly, this is quite similar to what is happening in my case-studies. There is not an original view of a photographer to return to, but the spectator is invited to “occupy” a view, actually an

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embodied perceptual experience by someone suffering from deviated perceptions due to mental disorder. It confirms Geimer’s remark that even though the majority of photography could be identified as a medium between two gazes, in many cases it does not reproduce “the gaze that we cast upon the world.” The invisible or “blind” aspects of photography are related by Geimer more in particular to the spectator’s expectations, experiences, and imaginations (2018, 187). With regard to failures in photographs, Geimer advises to consider representation and its disruption not as antagonistic, because “we need to recognize the disturbance, the accident or incident, as a constitutive element of photography” (2018, 76). This statement can be applied to Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s deliberate disruptions. In reference to philosopher Paul Virilio’s notion of the invention of accident, Geimer wonders how one can invent something that is unexpected and unpredictable. His explanation is helpful to understand my case-studies. The notion involved seems to be paradoxical, as we are used to regard accidents as “events that befall us from outside, that occur, undesired and unforeseen.” Virilio, however, refers to accidents that “do not crash into the scene from an outside realm beyond all explanation; they are latent in the process— unforeseen, but always already possible, unexpected and yet ‘waiting to happen’” (2018, 50). This is certainly applicable to Simonutti’s practice in the darkroom (2012b), but even more interesting is that this characterization of photography is quite alike deviated perceptual experiences, as discussed in this chapter. When thinking in terms of technical failures, underexposure is often considered as such. If so far I addressed darkness only implicitly, at this point, having almost reached the end of my argument, it is remarkable to note that dimness almost functioned as a natural element in both photo-­ series discussed here. Darkness appears to evoke associations with isolation and invisibility, as opposed to all the light in the outside world. All the photographs discussed here address, in one way or another, the tension between “dark” inside and “artificial light” outside. The frame in fact served as a recurring concept, most literally in the form of framing by the borders of the lens of the camera, and most figuratively through discussing stereotypical framing of people with mental disorder. Frames weaken when perceptual experiences of direct sight and imagination merge, quite similar to compressions of multiple perceptual experiences in photographs. In several of the photographs discussed here, frames feature as a kind of

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prop in the form of doorways and windows.3 Frames also emphasize the borders between what is in and left out of perceptual fields or photographic frames. Finally, repetition of framed views closely relates photography to experiences of isolation (in the meaning of lack of change due to lack of interaction). This chapter revolved around the question of how views on deviated perception can be related to disturbances in photographs in order to provide insights into how the selected images can help us comprehend disrupted visual experiences associated with mental disorders. As argued, obstructed awareness of “presence” appears to create alienation and distance, which is somehow similar to various effects of blurredness in photographs. In the (semi-veiled) photographs discussed, blurredness blocks looking far off, but creates at the same time distance as a result of unclarity, drawing the spectator to and fro. Moreover, a consideration of perception as both visual and social interaction underscores the substantial role of photographic frames as addressing visibility in relationship with awareness of “outer-frame” invisibility. In photography, a medium that needs light to make things visible, the explicit use of darkness is a powerful strategy for creating disrupted visibility. If reproduction is inherent to photography, repetition came to serve as a metaphor for absence of change and interaction in my case-studies. Philosophical reflections on deviated perceptual experiences, identified as compressed presence and double bookkeeping (as reduced and disrupted discrepancy between perceiving and imagining), helped to clarify that the visual effects in Zellweger’s and Simonutti’s photographs may be interpreted in quite similar ways. As a result, these photographs not only encourage us to think about disturbed perception, but also allow us to come closer to the visual experiences involved.

References Breyer, Thiemo. 2015. Social Visibility and Perceptual Normativity. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 140–157. London: Palgrave. Dewalque, Arnaud. 2015. The Normative Force of Perceptual Justification. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 178–195. London: Palgrave. 3  In a previous study, I reflected on the metaphoric use of doorways and windows as spaces of transition in spheres of conflict in Naomi Levari’s short film Draft (Westgeest 2015).

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Doyon, Maxime, and Thiemo Breyer, eds. 2015. Normativity in Perception. London: Palgrave. Foucault, Michel. 1965/1988. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1986. Of Other Places. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27. Based on lecture “Des Espaces Autres,” March 1967. Gallagher, Shaun. 2015. Seeing Things in the Right Way: How Social Interaction Shapes Perception. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 117–127. London: Palgrave. Geimer, Peter. 2018. Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harpin, Anna. 2018. Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness. London & New York: Routledge. Madary, Michael. 2015. Seeing Our World. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 56–72. London: Palgrave. Morris, David. 2015. Illusions and Perceptual Norms as Spandrels of the Temporality of Living. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 75–90. London: Palgrave. Natale, Simone. 2016. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Ratcliffe, Matthew. 2015. How Is Perceptual Experience Possible? The Phenomenology of Presence and the Nature of Hallucination. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 91–113. London: Palgrave. ———. 2017. Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Simonutti, Lauren E. 2010. Artist Talk. https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/14033491. Accessed 15 November 2021. Simonutti, Lauren E. 2011. 8 Rooms, 7 Mirrors, 6 Clocks, 2 Minds & 199 Panes of Glass. F-Stop: A Photography Magazine 47 (June–July). https://www.fstopmagazine.com/pastissues/47/featured.html. Accessed 15 November 2021. Simonutti, Lauren E. 2012a. Statements on Website Deviant Art. https://www. d e v i a n t a r t . c o m / l a u r e n -­r a b b i t / a r t / S p i r i t -­p h o t o g r a p h -­h o l d i n g -­ hands-­279983413. Accessed 15 November 2021. ———. 2012b. Statements on Website of E-magazine. Lens Culture. https:// www.lensculture.com/articles/lauren-­e-­simonutti-­photographic-­notes-­from-­ a-­madhouse. Accessed 15 November 2021. Ullrich, Wolfgang. 2002/2009. Die Geschichte der Unschärfe [The History of Blurredness]. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach.

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Van Gelder, Hilde, and Helen Westgeest. 2011. Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. Wehrle, Maren. 2015. Normality and Normativity in Experience. In Normativity in Perception, ed. Maxime Doyon and Thiemo Breyer, 128–139. London: Palgrave. Westgeest, Helen. 2015. Spaces of Transition and Framed Passages in a Sphere of Conflict. Short Film Studies (November): 209–212. Zellweger, Matthieu. 2019. Worlds Beyond/Mondes Parallèles. Gollion: Infolio éditions. ———. Interview with the Author by Email on 23 November 2021 and 10 January 2022.

CHAPTER 10

Selfies as “Control Pictures”: Mastering Fearful Psychosomatic Images Through the Photo Camera Ana Peraica

Our death was a black spot right behind the left shoulder —(Carlos Castaneda 2013, 17)

Our perception of the physical world’s completeness is constructed from fragments of sense data. One of the most patchworked sense-data constructions is our assumption that space exists behind our back, as the leading sense, the eye, is inadequate at reporting it, covering only about 120° in parallax of binocular vision. Thus, rather than being visible, the back world is a zone that we experience through our other senses. We smell,

Parts of this text were presented at Re:sound Media Art Histories conference held in Aalborg, Denmark, in 2019.

A. Peraica (*) Danube University Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8_10

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touch, and hear it rather than seeing it. However, because the olfactory, haptic, and auditory senses report about it primarily through alarming due to disruption—and thus in discontinuity—this zone beyond visibility is frequently a zone of stress resulting from unannounced events interrupting the area we are constantly monitoring in front. Not surprisingly, it has found a home in horror myths and fictions, from folk tales to horror films. In this chapter I will analyze the distinction between mentally visualizing life-threatening events in this zone of stress and experiencing them through the mediation of photographic technology (more precisely, through the smartphone’s camera). I will define the former type of visuals as psychosomatic images, or the images we imagine and that make us tremble, and the latter type as control pictures, or the reality check. Those images serve to release us from our fears and to reassure us. For example, the first would be an imagined rapist and killer pursuing us through the dark park, while the second would be a record of the cat whose route briefly overlapped ours. In the first section, I will relate these two types of visuals to two formative myths for Western, ocular centric culture, both of which capture the back world—the myth of Orpheus and the myth of Perseus—in order to distinguish differences between psychosomatic images and control pictures. The second section briefly discusses some historical theories of photography which use death as metaphor for taking photographs. Next, I address the genre of necrophiliac images, which deals with death from an abject perspective. The final section contrasts two types of photographs representing the dead body: Victorian postmortem images of deceased family members within the private environment, and selfies with dead people that circulate on the internet and that demonstrate an entirely different relationship with corpses. Trying to locate what is the imagined and what is real for the photographer of these selfies, I will argue that a psychosomatic image grounds this kind of selfie culture. My main question is how the rationalization force of the camera masters the psychosomatic fearful image in the case of selfies, using the necrophiliac image as a reference point for the fear of death, and the Victorian postmortem images as counterpoint. Although we do not see the fear itself, the presence of the control picture implies that another image is at work—the author’s preconception. That preconceived, psychosomatic image is consequently unphotographable, as photography is used to rationalize fear.

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Mastering the World Behind Our Backs The world behind our leading visual sense is a ghostly companion to the continuous world we see in front. While the former cannot be seen, the latter is constantly monitored. In this chapter, I will use the term “back world” to be able to contrast it to the definition of the front world. The back world is thus a territory that we do not perceive as immediately as the front world, but we accept it as a prerogative for our physical presence. Actually, the meaning of this term is quite alike David Wills’s term “dorsality,” which he defined as a “a name for that from behind, from or in the back of the human” (Wills 2008, 5). If Wills’s interpretation is developed through an examination of primarily philosophical sources, such as Heidegger, Levinas, Althusser, and Nietzsche, as well as literary works by Rimbaud and Sade, it is applicable to visual studies as well (Peraica 2021). Particularly interesting for my argument is Wills’s definition of two different ways of access to the dorsal world. The first one is natural. As he notes: “But what is behind cannot be seen without a turning; knowing what is ‘in back’ requires the compound artifice of a double mirror, hence an inverted narcissism” (Wills 2008, 12). The second is technological, as he defines how dorsality from or in the back of a human “turns [it] into something technological, some technological thing” (5). These two scenarios, of a sudden head turn and mediation with a reflective surface, or natural and technological, are described in the ancient myths that underpin our Western, ocular centric civilization. In the tragic story about the loss of love, Orpheus turns his head to check the reality behind him, whereas in the heroic tale about Perseus, the protagonist overcomes danger. The world behind Orpheus and Eurydice, as retold by Virgil and Ovid, is the zone of Hades, the world of the dead. According to the narrative, Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, died as a consequence of a snake bite. Orpheus played his lute so lamentably after losing her that the ruler of Hades, Pluto, permitted him to descend to the world of the dead. He negotiated Eurydice’s release, who might accompany him out of Hades, on one condition: he should never look back while walking out. Uncertain whether his love would indeed follow him, Orpheus did precisely that. He turned his head and permanently lost his wife for the second time. To imagine that Eurydice is not following, Orpheus had to have an image, one created by his anxiety, with none behind. This image, that Eurydice is not following, must have haunted him. And it was this image, the image made by

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fear, that made him to turn his head, which was precisely what he should not have done to keep his wife. If Orpheus would have had the courage of Perseus, who would have been wise enough to never look straight into danger with his naked eyes, he would almost certainly never become a widower. In contrast to the insecure Orpheus, Perseus, who was supposed to confront the Gorgon Medusa’s murderous gaze, was a hero. He used a polished reflective shield as intermediator to monitor the evil creature. To master the Medusa, Perseus made use of two images: his mental image of Medusa’s direct gaze, and the one he creates—the miniature reflection of Medusa in the polished shield. What Perseus imagined was not an empty world behind him, but something which could lead to his own demise. This preconception, or the psychosomatic image, is critical for his decision regarding his actions of regaining control. He needs to know what to fight against. Thus, Perseus acquires his powers solely through the mediation of the psychosomatic image induced by fear and the control image captured by his tool. In his case, the image is the weapon, which was recognized by Georges Didi-Huberman who turns to this myth in his analysis of images made by prisoners of Auschwitz.1 As he notes: “Perseus confronts the Gorgona in spite of all, and this in spite of all—this is de facto possibility, despite a legitimate impossibility—is called image, the shield and the reflection are not only protection but weapons, ruse, technical means for beheading the monster” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 179).2 In both myths, psychosomatic images or world preconceptions created by anxiousness before the action inspire a specific action. For its advanced act of mediation, Simon Blackburn saw the myth of Perseus as one of the framing myths of Western civilization, as the one that develops a medium of confrontation with the Real (Blackburn 2014). As the history of Western civilization can be read as the history of confronting reality through the invention of various reality mediating technologies, confronting the back world may be necessary for completing the confrontation of the real in the front world. So how did we technologically master the back world?

1  “The story of Perseus teaches us … the power of confrontation of this Real” (Didi-­ Huberman 2008, 179). 2  He also refers to Siegfried Kracauer, who recognizes in the same myth “a will to know [by removing] a taboo from the horror” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 178).

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The obsidian glass, which was also used by Mayan Indians to observe the solar eclipse, was one of the first devices used to represent (and manipulate) reality behind one’s back. A black mirror, also known as Specchio nero in Italian and Schwarz-spiegel in German, was a similar device. It was a small piece of usually convex, black-tinted glass used to depict the landscape. Originally used by Claude Lorrain, a seventeenth-century landscape painter, this tool is also known as the Claude glass (Maillet 2004). As seen reflected in this black mirror, the landscape looked quite painterly and gained a kind of romantic atmosphere. It is darker and more contrasted (due to the lack of color) than vision by the bare eye, while also providing a broader view. Occasionally, it also has a distinct gold and metallic blue tone. Interestingly, the black mirror does not intend to control the back world; this device is rather meant to add to the unspectacular landscape a mysterious painterly mood. Today, a device resembling the backward looking of the Claude glass, though less painterly, is standard in rear-view car mirrors, while it also serves as an inexpensive and straightforward surveillance device in, for instance, small shops. What makes this tool unique is that, in order to provide a broader view, it manipulates distances, displaying objects in the background further than they actually are. Thus, rear-view mirrors are frequently accompanied by a printed label indicating how it alters proportions by scaling them down and distorting distances, as well as pointing out that objects in the mirror seem to be further away than they actually are (or, in the opposite case, objects in the mirror look as if closer than they actually are). Recently, the rear-view mirror’s camera view has been incorporated into mobile phones.3 As a result, the back world has become more accessible than ever. Apart from taking selfies, this camera is used, for instance, as a common mirror for applying makeup and a rear-view mirror for controlling objects and events in our rear. Particularly the selfie cameras enable a detailed control of the world behind our back. Like in the case of the original dark mirror, we turn the world behind our back into a picture, but selfies are rather made to maintain control over the back world. In some instances, selfies are taken where we are unable to turn our heads backward for some reason. Later in this chapter I will address the question of whether a smartphone camera functions as a Perseus device, as a tool for mediation of a threatening reality.

3  Although it was invented in 1999, it took a decade for this front camera on mobile phones to become a tool for a new genre of selfies.

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Recording of Corpses and the Metaphor of Death in Photography Theory Contemporary selfie-makers, like Perseus, wield considerable control over the dreadful reality via their mobile phones, in particular when recording death. In the myth of Perseus, the creation of a technological image and death were strongly related. This connection calls forth the oft-mentioned bond between photography and death. Introduced as a technological necessity in the mid-nineteenth century, photographs of corpses were common due to the exposure time of up to 20 minutes in the open air. According to Hillel Schwartz, the first instance of this practice occurred a mere two years after the medium’s invention (Schwartz 1996). For example, Isaac Wetherby used daguerreotypes to photograph corpses in the mortuary in order to paint their portraits postmortem (ibid.). This practice appeared to be so pervasive that it prompted Walter Benjamin to include it in his Short History of Photography (1931). In the Victorian era, photographs of corpses developed into a distinct genre known as postmortem photography (Pardo and Morcate 2008; Linkman 2011).4 A corpse was neatly arranged according to conventions for taking postmortem photographs. In some cases, the final picture involved a composite photograph of the corpse and portraits of posing family members. These images were not meant to be horrific scenes, but scenes of family love and warmth. Even more frequent, though, are references to death as metaphor in photographic theory. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin elaborated on photography’s mortuary effect, or rigor mortis (Benjamin 1972), which resulted from the freezing of reality’s movement into an image. In the 1940s, in a note to his essay “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin referred to a death mask effect of the medium (Bazin 1960, 7). It was Roland Barthes who developed the most systematic theory of the metaphor of death in his seminal Camera Lucida (1981). Barthes defined photography as a medium through the concept of flat death. He wrote: “Ultimately, what I am seeking in the One photograph taken of me … is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph” (Barthes 1981, 15). Thus,  Thanatos Archive—Early Postmortem and Mourning Photography http://thanatos.net. Burns Archive http://www.burnsarchive.com/Explore/Historical/Memorial/index.html. 4

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Barthes described the moment of death of a person, whose specific appearance immediately vanishes as soon as the photograph is taken. Whether a body is dead or alive, the person represented in the photograph does not exist anymore in exactly the same way after its being taken: the photograph is like a mirror that stops changing along with the person who looks into it. In line with this view, the selfie-maker in front of a corpse dies after having taken the photographic image. Due to the fact, then, that there is no distinction between dead and alive in the image, death in the photographic image is not as frightening as death in reality. This paradox, of making things less frightening by observing them through a camera viewfinder, is inherent in war photography. War photography often exploits this paradoxical distancing. As a result, combat photographers were frequently criticized, while witnessing acts of violence, for placing a higher premium on capturing the image than on assisting a victim.5 Still, reality as seen through the camera viewfinder, in particular when using telephoto lenses, is rarely identical to reality or the developed image. As the image shows it to be closer, reality is more distant and tinier (Peraica 2011). So today we have become accustomed to seeing images captured on battlefields and in various natural disasters (Batchen 2012). We are confronted not only with images of the dead, but also with a mass media culture of death.

Necrophiliac Images and Dark Selfies Throughout the 1980s, the discourse of death migrated from photography theory to cultural studies. Following Georges Bataille (1957), contemporary cultural theory—in particular French authors such as Jacques Derrida (1996) and Maurice Blanchot (1999), but most notably Julia Kristeva—has expressed an anxiety toward negative concepts in general, including death. Kristeva made the most significant contribution by defining the necrophiliac image. As she wrote in her Powers of Horror, A decaying body, lifeless, completely turned into dejection, blurred between the inanimate and the inorganic, a transitional swarming, inseparable lining of a human nature whose life is indistinguishable from the symbolic—the corpse represents fundamental pollution. A body without soul, a non-body, 5  War photography and reporting constitute a distinct genre, frequently chastised for their moral stances (Sontag 1977, 2003).

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disquieting matter, it is to be excluded from God’s territory as it is from his speech. (1984, 109)

Elsewhere she observed: “The corpse, seen without God, and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life” (1984, 4).6 The deceased body should not be touched, as it is impure and contaminating, and the only way to cleanse it is through the funeral, but also through the image. As it did for Perseus, the image of the dead body endows us with the ability to resist infection. Below I would like to turn to the most current genre reporting on death: dark selfies. Dark selfies is a catch-all term for several distinct types of self-­portraiture that feature the dead or death as a theme: “funeral selfies” (Gibbs et al. 2014; Meese et al. 2015) and “memorial selfies” taken in dark locations and landscapes as memorials and scaffolds (Hodalska 2017; Bareither 2020). In these self-portraits, a corpse or a graveyard appears behind the self-portraying person. Dead bodies are being discovered in the front seat of cars, next to the driver taking the selfie, on the street, and being exposed in public sermons (Fig. 10.1). The general practice of corpse recording is not a new phenomenon; in the past, numerous types of photographs were used for this purpose, including the aforementioned Victorian postmortem photographs, forensic crime scene images, medical documentation (in particular on dissection), as well as newspaper reports. What is new is the inclusion of a self-portrait within such depiction. Among the abovementioned genres that depict dead bodies, dark selfies are most akin to Victorian postmortem photographs, as they also feature someone in a relationship with the dead body. Yet, there are numerous differences between Victorian postmortem photographs and selfies with cadavers that require closer examination, in terms of content as well as at a formal level.7 There is, for instance, a Victorian family portrait of parents hugging their deceased daughter (Fig. 10.2). The scene is brimming with warmth and affection. Quite different is the selfie of a younger man who records himself in front of his grandmother’s deathbed (Fig.  10.1). Although there is no sign of affection or touch in this image, it is inscribed with a 6  It seems that, according to Kristeva’s distinction, this is done by perverts. As she writes: “Corpse fanciers, worshipers of a soulless body, are thus preeminent representatives of inimical religions, identified by their murderous cults” (109). 7  Many of these photographs were criticized as being hoaxes, as in many cases it is impossible to distinguish a dead person from a sleeping one. Similarly, there are selfies with people looking as if dead that are hardly convincing.

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Fig. 10.1  Selfie with dead body (viral image)

message of sadness. We do not have a lot of information about either of the images. The reason we know so little about the first is that it was never intended to be public. The second image, a selfie, was sent into a public networked space but appears to have been deleted, so we are unable to decode it. Still, it is clear that photography is incapable of establishing the distinction between deceased and alive subjects in both cases, because neither the girl with open eyes nor the granny who may also be asleep can be proven to be dead by the image viewer. They both flatten life, as Barthes observed,

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Fig. 10.2  Victorian postmortem family portrait of parents with their deceased daughter (the work in the public domain, source: Wikimedia)

but also death. Only the author of the image, whether behind or in front of the camera, can bear witness to it. However, considering that dead bodies can still infect us (despite photography’s ability to flatten death), the selfie image demonstrates the fear of infection more than the Victorian image. It elucidates the act of “death infecting life” as discussed by Kristeva.

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A Psychosomatic Fearful Image Turned into a Dark Selfie as Control Picture Both the Victorian postmortem photograph and the selfie with cadaver report on death by recording a dead body. Both capture the concept of mortality through the presence of a dead body, but they do so not as a mortal self (Raymond 2021), but as a mortal Other. Yet, what is visible immediately is the very different location of the scene. Whereas the Victorian photograph tended to be taken in private settings with the deceased person exposed, such as a bedroom or living room, selfies are opportunity seekers; they are often taken during the funeral session in a non-private setting. These include, but are not limited to, hospitals, forensic departments, anatomical classes, and graveyards. As a result, Victorian images are intimate, contrary to dark selfies. The second obvious difference relates to the presence of the author of the image and its relationship to the deceased. In Victorian photographs, the actual photographer is hidden behind a camera, whereas in the selfies, the image author is included in the image. Actually, the true author of the Victorian photograph is the commissioner: the family members depicted in the image who establish a connection with the deceased. In terms of genre and location of shooting, Victorian images are intimate, and this intimacy reveals itself in a variety of ways. While a corpse will commonly appear in the foreground of a Victorian image, lined with family members and “looking at the camera” as everyone else, in selfies the corpse tends to be pushed toward the background. Or, more precisely, while in Victorian images the corpse is touched, hugged, and kissed, in selfies it has a more indirect, secondary presence. The image is somehow fractured, as if there is no meaningful connection between the two levels. This distancing strategy in selfies implies the absence of a connection between the person in the front and the corpse in the back, or that a psychopathological atmosphere or suppressed emotions are present, creating a surreal atmosphere. This effect is amplified by lens distortion. Moreover, a selfie-maker will turn their back to the dead body, neglecting it in a way, while simultaneously recording. This gives rise to a two-layered image: a self-portrait of the author facing the viewer’s gaze in the first plane and a less critical report on the death of another person in the second plane. The subjective and objective death reports are thus separated, demonstrating that the real person is turning away from the scene in order to

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avoid seeing it, while the camera records it. Indeed, the author of the selfie will be able to see the corpse while recording the image, but only as a tiny image in the distance shrunk to the size of a mobile phone screen. This difference between a direct subjective and indirect objective report, in which the selfie-maker records this shrunken dead body rather than touching or embracing it, is amplified with paradoxical grimace. While people in Victorian photography posed with neutral expressions, almost visibly holding back their tears, the selfie features an expression of hysterical emotion, frequently laughter. This laughter seems to establish a sadistic relationship toward the dead body at first. Indeed, it is the dead body that is desecrated, and it is powerless to defend itself. However, because a corpse cannot be harmed, it will not be offended, and thus all human actions will be meaningless to it. That would mean that it is only us, the viewers, who are addressed by these images. We—the audience—are harmed and terrified as we are confronted by a sadistic author who is pushing us toward a scene of death to which they have turned their back. As viewers, we are placed in the position of the abject. Thus, the image operates on a metonymic level, forwarding the responsibility for the transgressing of the dead body’s right to privacy onto the responsibility of the viewer for watching the scene. It operates between genuine disgust of the dead body, as revealed by the image’s distancing, and simulated control of the same body achieved through the act of recording and presenting it to us. But who is us? In comparison to commemorative and personal Victorian photographs, selfies are made for the internet public and as such they function in a different context (Eckel et al. 2018; Murray 2022). They are widely distributed and sometimes accidentally transmitted. By becoming viral, they have the potential to generate unintended meanings and scandals. In other words, while Victorian photography served the purpose of creating a private family album, selfies are taken for the purpose of creating a global album available on the internet. Due to the purpose of the image in Victorian photography, the intended immediate audience largely coincides with the addresser, whereas in selfie photography, the audience is completely unknown and unforeseeable. Rather than with corpses, selfie-­ makers develop relationships with unknown internet users who view their images. But why would anyone want to send a personal report on “not being afraid” to everyone online? If the creator is unable to predict the final interpreter of the image and its context, the spectator may read out a sender’s flimsy proof of not being

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afraid, of not being disturbed by death, streamed to the “whole universe.” The reason is that the dark selfie actually establishes a relationship with death in general, rather than with a single dead body. Specifically, whereas the cadaver in the background serves as a documentary presence, the author of the selfie in the foreground confronts death. The image witnesses on the author’s braveness to “unface” death. Selfies contain both an objective and a subjective personal representation of death, with participants displaying themselves in the symbolic order in relation to their own inevitable end. The selfie with a dead body creates a tension between the subjective experience of death and its objectification, or neutralization, through media. By returning their gaze to the dead body, selfie-makers demonstrate their actual necrophobia while simultaneously documenting it (thus behaving necrophiliac). And this inverse rhetorical point may become critical. Incapable, as Victorians, of directly confronting or touching the dead body, they seem to communicate their actual fear. In this sense, the images created by selfie-makers are a synthesis of the psychosomatic image of anxiety regarding “death infecting life” and its reality check. The image is intended to confirm a preexisting mental image, a terrifying notion, and a genuine fear that the dead body in the back can exert influence over us, which is denied by the very act of the image-making. Like Perseus, these selfie-takers are creating a control image of the world in the background. Dark selfie-takers are not directly confronted with corpses and have no bodily connection to them. Instead, they present an indirect connection, as Perseus did when he watched the Gorgon Medusa in order to kill her. While in the Victorian era the camera’s mirroring shield was used to record and document death, it now helps to distance and control reality in selfies with dead bodies. While mediating it, creators of dark selfies can exert control over their fears of looking death directly in the eyes. Thus, the image they have of the world behind them may have been preconceived and burdened with anxiety from death infection. The act of image-taking could correct this image. The psychosomatic image—the image induced by fear—is compensated through a small image on the camera screen, uploaded to the network, that communicates: I am not afraid, I am more robust, and I am capable of laughing. As a result, approaching the preexisting image or psychosomatic image may be necessary for comprehending the dark selfie culture’s excessive genres.

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References Bareither, Christoph. 2020. Difficult Heritage and Digital Media: ‘Selfie Culture’ and Emotional Practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. International Journal of Heritage Studies 27: 57–72. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Bataille, Georges. (1957) 1986. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. San Francisco: City Light Publishers. Batchen, Geoffrey. 2012. Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis. London: Reaktion. Bazin, André. 1960. Ontology of the Photographic Image. Film Quarterly 13 (4): 4–9. Benjamin, Walter. (1931) 1972. Screen 13 (1): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.1093/ screen/13.1.5 Blackburn, Simon. 2014. Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blanchot, Maurice. 1999. The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press. Castaneda, Carlos. 2013. Power of Silence. New York; London; Toronto; Sidney: Washington Square Press (Pocket books). Derrida, Jacques. 1996. The Gift of Death. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eckel, Julia, Jens Ruchatz, and Sabine Wirth. 2018. Exploring the Selfie. London: Springer International Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan. Gibbs, Martin, et al. 2014. Selfies at Funerals: Remediating Rituals of Mourning. Internet research conference 15 (Oct.): 23–25. Hodalska, Magdalena. 2017. Selfies at Horror Sites: Dark Tourism, Ghoulish Souvenirs and Digital Narcissism. Zeszyty Prasoznawcze 60 (2): 405–423. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Linkman, Audrey. 2011. Photography and Death. London: Reaktion. Maillet, Arnaud. 2004. The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror. Chicago: University of Chicago. Meese, James, et al. 2015. Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platform. International Journal of Communication 9: 14. Murray, Derek Conrad, ed. 2022. Visual Culture and Approaches to the Selfie. New York: Routledge. Pardo, Rebecca, and Montse Morcate. 2008. Illness, Death and Grief. In Photography: The Key Concepts, ed. David Bate. New York: Routledge. Peraica, Ana. 2011. Fear of the Unknown and Eyes Wide Open of Photography. Fotografija 44/45: 15–25.

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———. 2018. Selfies and the World Behind Our Back. Membrana 3 (1). Accessed 10 December 2021. https://doi.org/10.47659/m4.048.art. ———. 2021. Selfies as Augmentation of (Disappearing) Reality. In The Aesthetics and Politics of the Online Self, ed. Peter Serram, Teresa Numerico, Geert Lovink, and Donatella Della Ratta. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­65497-­9_12. Raymond, Claire. 2021. The Selfie, Temporality and Contemporary Photography. New York: Routledge. Schwartz, Hillel. 1996. Culture of the Copy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. Westminster: Penguin. ———. (1977) 2005. On Photography. New York: Rosetta Books. Wills, David. 2008. Dorsality. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Index1

A Abnormality, 3, 22, 124, 162 Absence, 18, 51, 61–68, 94, 107, 108, 122–125, 145, 172, 179, 193 Acute social withdrawal, 8, 9, 18, 23 Adivasi, 10, 138–143, 146–153 Ajotikar, Rasika, 139 Alienation, 46, 50, 148, 179 Allen, Neil Walsh, 69, 77 Alyami, Mohsen, 1 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2, 140, 141 Anguelova, Katia, 46, 47 Annus, Amar, 145 Anorexia, 82, 91, 123 Anxiety, 1, 2, 4, 21, 22, 47, 91, 99, 185, 189, 195 Anxiety disorder, 2, 21 Apparatus, 32, 45, 51, 53–55, 88, 97, 99, 104, 105, 108, 123, 133 Aristotelian senses, 65 Arnheim, Rudolf, 69, 71, 74

Augustine, 115, 121, 122, 124, 126–131, 133, 134 Augustson, Shawn, 8 Autism, 45, 46, 53 Azoulay, Ariella, 119 B Bachelard, Gaston, 9, 18, 23, 28, 29 Back world, 183–187 Badcock, C.R., 3 Baer, Ulrich, 7, 39, 119, 127, 131 Bal, Mieke, 114, 134 Banerjee, Prathama, 138, 139 Barbakow, Max, 32 Bareither, Christoph, 190 Barrera Contreras, Miriam, 149 Barry, Christopher T., 7 Barthes, Roland, 10, 33, 69, 82, 84, 85, 88, 91, 93–95, 103, 188, 189, 191 Bataille, Georges, 87, 189

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Shobeiri, H. Westgeest (eds.), Psychosomatic Imagery, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22715-8

199

200 

INDEX

Batchen, Geoffrey, 189 Bazin, André, 5, 33, 69, 188 Becher, Bernd, 55 Becher, Hilla, 55 Bell, Charles, 65 Bell, John, 151 Belting, Hans, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 34, 46, 188 Bennett, Elizabeth A., 20 Berger, John, 98 Bergstein, Mary, 5 Berlant, Lauren Gail, 103 Berman, Noami, 22 Bidart, Frank, 69 Biedermeier, 46 Bipolar disorder (BD), 4, 8, 10, 140, 141, 145–148, 150–153 Black, Jeremy, 2 Blackburn, Simon, 186 Black box, 53 Black mirror, 187 Blackshaw, Gemma, 39 Blanchot, Maurice, 189 Blekastad, Atle, 18, 19, 22–28, 30, 34–36 Blind field, 8 Blind spot, 54, 55, 177 Blurred, 104, 162, 165, 170, 171, 173, 189 Blurredness, 8, 167, 170, 171, 179 Boada, Gustavo, 151 Body dysphoria, 64 Boime, Albert, 90 Bourneville, Désiré-Magloire, 114, 122, 127, 129 Brand, Gabrielle, 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 44 Brewster, Liz, 7 Breyer, Thiemo, 161, 170 Brown, Bill, 98 Bryson, Norman, 52 Buchan, Catherine A, 7 Buda, Octavian, 5

C Cadava, Eduardo, 19, 34, 35 Campbell, Donald T., 101 Carrin, Marine, 152 Casey, Edward S., 9, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27 Castaneda, Carlos, 183 Cavell, Stanley, 33 Chapman, Robert, 100 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 5, 10, 115, 117, 121, 122, 124, 125, 127–129, 131, 134 Chaturvedi, Santosh K., 141 Chen, Xi, 18, 22, 30 Chernbach, Nicolae G., 5 Choi, Incheol, 1 Claude glass, 187 Claustrophobic space, 45 Clinical gaze, 4, 5, 125, 133 Coexistentialism, 29, 30 Colom, F., 141 Compressed image, 163 Compressed presence, 166, 179 Compression, 10, 163, 164, 178 Control pictures, 183–195 Coronavirus, 1 Correggio, 87, 88, 90 Cotter, Katherine N., 137 Counter-site, 172 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2, 17–18 Cox, Andrew M., 7 Cresswell, Tim, 24, 28 Cultural pessimism, 47 Customary body, 26, 27 D Da Costa, Dia, 138 Dadariya, 138, 153 Dalal, Ajit K., 142 Darkness, 50, 125, 139, 167, 170, 178, 179 Dark selfies, 189–195

 INDEX 

Dark space, 49, 55 Davoine, Françoise, 81, 82, 86 Daydreaming, 28–30, 36 De Duve, Thierry, 150 De Gruyter, Jos, 9, 39–56 De la Cruz, Lorena Fernandez, 7 DeCoster, Vaughn, 6 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 32, 33, 36 Delusion, 165 Delusional atmosphere, 166, 167 Delusional experiences, 22 Depressed bodies, 103 Depression, 1, 2, 9, 21, 39–56, 103, 140, 141, 146, 150, 151 Depressive disorder, 21 Derrida, Jacques, 189 Desai, Geetha, 141 Designatory gaze, 114 Dewalque, Arnaud, 164, 165 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 21 Diagnostic gaze, 47 Dickerson, James, 6 Dickie, Jane R., 18, 21 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 5, 10, 39, 122, 125, 127–129, 133, 186, 186n1, 186n2 Dis-abled bodies, 100, 101, 108 Disabled mind, 99 Disarticulated bodies, 102 Disarticulation, 100–108 Dis-eased body, 100 Disembodied, 117 Disfigured re-articulations, 98 Dis-order, 93–108 Dis-ordered bodies, 98 Disruption, 3, 8, 9, 62, 159–175, 184 Disruptive frames, 10, 160, 173–175 Dissolution, 9, 81–83 Divided self, 82 Doane, Mary Ann, 63, 69–74, 76, 77 Dolins, Francine L., 147 Dooley, Jemima, 7

201

Dorsality, 185 Double bookkeeping, 165–167, 179 Double exposure, 8, 73, 163, 166 Double-fixed image, 99 Doyon, Maxime, 161 Dozois, David J.A., 1 DSM-V, 102, 102n1 Dysfunction, 2, 3, 9, 50, 102, 123 Dysfunctional, 3, 45, 46 E Eckel, Julia, 194 Edelman, Catherine, 164, 169, 175 Elwin, Verrier, 138 Endogenous psychology, 142 Epidemiology, 47 Erdner, Anette, 6 Ess, Barbara, 94, 104–108 Eternal return, 9, 19, 31–36 Eurydice, 185 Evans, David, 7 Evidence-based photography, 6 F Fading, 44, 150 Failures, 102, 124, 171, 177, 178 Feminism, 119 Fetish, 52 Filipovic, Elena, 45 Finger, Stanley, 63, 64, 65n1 Florsheim, David Borges, 5 Flusser, Vilém, 40, 53, 55, 96–99 Foucault, Michel, 4, 47, 95, 99, 171–173 Framing, 8, 93, 94, 141, 142, 167, 178, 186 Fraser, Kathryn, 4 Freeze-frame, 53 Freud, Sigmund, 122, 127 Friday, Jonathan, 33–35 Furler, John, 7

202 

INDEX

G Gallagher, Shaun, 176 Gallun, Lucy, 143, 146 Gamen, 20 Gaudillière, Jean-Max, 81, 82, 86 Geimer, Peter, 71, 161, 162, 173, 177, 178 Gennep, Arnold van, 101 Georget, Etienne-Jean, 90 Géricault, Theodore, 90, 91 Gibbs, Martin, 190 Gill, Gauri, 10, 137–149 Gilman, Sander L., 3, 39 Giummarra, Melita J., 64 Glissant, Édouard, 94–96, 105, 108 Goy, Bertrand, 149 Graham, George, 3 Green, Anthony, 2 Grigg, Alex, 69 Grosz, Elizabeth, 121 Gueules Cassées, 98 Guzy, Lidia, 138, 152 H Hacker, Katherine, 138 Halligan, Peter, 64, 67 Hallucination, 165 Hamasaki, Yukiko, 21 Happell, Brenda, 7 Haq, Nav, 45 Haraway, Donna Jeanne, 100 Harpin, Anna, 4, 39, 174–176 Harris, Tristan, 107 Haslam, N., 102n1 Heraclitus, 33, 34 Herman, Judith Lewis, 101 Heterotopia, 172, 173 Hikikomori, 8, 9, 17–36 Hindu caste system, 138 Hivale, Shamrao, 138 Hodalska, Magdalena, 190 Hoet, Jan, 39 Hoffman, Anne Golomb, 5

Horwitz, Allan V., 102n1 Householder, A.S., 147 Huebler, Douglas, 55 Hustwit, Meredith P., 63, 64, 65n1 Hysteria, 5, 8, 113–115, 117, 119–122, 124–125, 127–129, 133, 134 Hysteric, 5, 39, 96, 113, 115, 118, 121, 123, 124, 127–129, 131, 133, 134 Hysterical, 5, 113, 117, 128, 131, 194 Hysteric body, 113 Hysteric reading, 114 Hysteric semiotics, 114, 134 I Idiorrhythm, 95 Idiorrhythmic communities, 93, 95 Idiorrhythmy, 94–96 Illich, Ivan, 103, 104 Illusion, 11, 24, 77, 98, 161 Imagination, 27, 30, 124, 143, 163–165, 168n2, 178 Index as deixis, 9, 63, 70, 74, 76 Index as trace, 63, 70, 74, 76 Indexical iconicity, 70, 72, 73, 75 Indian Psychology (IP), 142 Instability, 3, 103 Integrated reject, 10, 93, 94, 99, 101–108 Intimate immensity, 29, 30 Invisibility, 140, 173, 178, 179 Inwardness, 45 Irwin, Catherine, 69 Iversen, Margaret, 7, 61 J Jaspers, Karl, 166, 167 Joiner, Thomas, 1 Jolicoeur, Nicole, 10, 113–132 Jones, David Houston, 85, 87, 88

 INDEX 

K Kafka, Franz, 4, 17 Kaleidoscopic view, 114 Kato, Takashiro A., 20, 21 Keats, Patrice A, 6 Kew, John, 67 Kirk, Stuart A., 102n1 Knauff, Markus, 147 Koan, 81, 82 Kokna, 138, 139 Kracauer, Siegfried, 26, 186n2 Krieg, Alexander, 18, 21 Kristeva, Julia, 189, 190n6, 192 Küng, Moritz, 40 Kutchins, Herb, 102n1 L Lacan, Jacques, 98, 120 Lambert, Léopold, 149 Latency, 7, 8 Latent, 8, 127, 133, 178 Lefebvre, Henri, 95 Lenggenhager, Bigna, 64, 77 Leporello-format, 159 Lewin, Kurt, 147 Linkman, Audrey, 188 Loewenthal, Del, 6 Loop, 32, 177 Looping, 44 M Madary, Michael, 176 Madness, 5, 39, 46, 47, 82, 86, 94, 99, 171, 173 Magila, Marilena, 21n1 Maillet, Arnaud, 187 Malabou, Catherine, 32 Mania, 140, 141, 146, 150, 151 Maniam, Yogeswary, 7 Manic-depressive, 150

203

Männig, Maria, 46 Mask, 10, 42, 43, 50, 71, 92, 94, 96, 100, 104, 107, 139, 140, 145–153, 188 Masked performance, 147, 151, 152 Masking, 96, 100 Mckenna, Kristine, 106, 107 Medusa, 186 Medusan clinical gaze, 125 Meek, Allen, 7 Meese, James, 190 Meltzer, Eve, 54 Melzack, Ronald, 65 Memory images, 26, 171, 174 Mental alienation, 46 Mental deviations, 101 Mental dis-ease, 100 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 26, 75 Metz, Christian, 33, 40, 52 Miller, Greg, 7 Mirror, 8, 9, 11, 29, 30, 35, 43, 45, 48, 55, 77, 83–90, 92, 108, 120, 121, 172, 173, 185, 187, 189 Mirror box, 77 Mise-en-abyme, 36 Misra, Girishwar, 142 Mitchell, Devin, 8 Mitchell, Robert W., 147 Mitchell, William J., 4, 53 Mitchell. W.J.T., 69, 94 Mnemotechnique, 26 Moini, Jahangir, 141 Montage, 44, 53 Mood disorder, 2, 140 Morris, David, 161 Murakami, Ryū, 20 Murphy, D., 102 Murray, Derek Conrad, 194 Musical imagery, 137 Muteness, 44 Myth, 11, 103n2, 184–186, 186n2, 188

204 

INDEX

N Natale, Simone, 162, 165, 166 Nebreda, David, 9, 81–92 Necrophiliac, 195 Necrophiliac image, 184, 189–192 Necrophobia, 195 Nejat, Nemet, 2 Nemesis, 103n2 Neurodiversity, 100 Niépce, Nicéphore, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 31, 35, 185 Noise, 8 Normativity of perception, 161, 176 O Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), 4 Opacity, 94–96, 105, 108 Orpheus, 184–186 Othering, 94, 98 Outcast, 102 Outer-frame, 176, 179 Outsider art, 39 Özdin, Selçuk, 1 Özdin, Şükriye Bayrak, 1 P Paik, Shailaja, 148 Palgi, Yuval, 1 Palmer, Victoria Jane, 7 Paranoia, 8 Paranoid schizophrenia, 81 Pardo, Rebecca, 188 Paré, Ambroise, 63, 64 Parker, Sharon, 4 Participatory photography (PP), 7 Passions, 88 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 70 Perseus, 184–188, 186n1, 190, 195 Personality disorder, 2, 7, 21 Phantom limb, 9, 61–68

Phobias, 48 Photo elicitation, 6 Photo-essays, 6 Photographic double, 9, 81–83 Phototherapy, 6 Photovoice, 7 Physiognomy, 5, 39 Pinhole photograph, 94 Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, 5 Place-grid, 26, 27 Place memory, 9, 18, 23, 27, 28, 30 Pollock, Griselda, 113, 114, 121, 123 Posing, 33, 84, 91, 188 Postmortem images, 184 Postmortem photograph, 188, 190, 193 Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 7, 8 Pradhan Gond artists, 152 Prendeville, Brendan, 91 Price, Douglas B., 64 Prinzhorn, Hans, 3 Projection, 8, 114, 119, 125, 128, 129, 134, 164, 172, 173 Proprioception, 65, 65n1, 74 Proprioceptive truth, 9, 63, 65, 72 Prosthetic, 41, 43, 96, 99 Prosthetic mask, 94, 96 Pseudo-hysteria, 128 Pseudo-pathology, 46 Psychiatric art, 3 Psychoanalytic theory, 82, 86 Psycho-pathological parlance, 47 Psycho-pathological state, 50 Psychosis, 7, 8, 39, 45, 81, 82, 86, 150, 176 Psychosomatic, 8, 19, 81, 82, 85, 86, 92, 100, 107, 138, 146, 160, 183–195 Psychosomatic dissolution, 9, 82 Psychosomatic dysphoria, 9, 62 Purohit, Mahendra Singh, 139

 INDEX 

R Ramis, Harold, 31 Rasas, 139, 151 Ratcliffe, Matthew, 164–167, 170, 173, 174, 176 Rawling, Katherine D. B., 6 Raymond, Claire, 193 Refracted images, 84 Re-implacing, 24, 25 Relph, Edward, 25 Repetition, 22, 30–32, 35, 36, 179 Repetitive images, 176 Reproducibility, 34–36, 61, 70 Reproduction, 34, 35, 51, 88, 90, 99, 126, 131, 179 Reproductive self-consciousness, 86 Reveries, 30, 93, 103 Rhea, Karen, 2 Rhuthmos, 95 Richer, Paul, 117, 131, 133 Richmond, Kia Jane, 4 Rizzo, Flavio, 22 Roelstraete, Dieter, 53 Rose, Jacqueline, 120 Rowell, Margit, 53 Ruchatz, Jens, 63, 69, 71, 75–77 Rudenstine, Sasha, 1 Ruscha, Ed, 55 S Saito, T., 20, 21, 21n1 Salpêtrière, 5, 10, 90, 113–115, 117, 119, 121–125, 128, 129, 133 Sameness, 32, 36 Sandblom, Philip, 4, 39 Sass, Louis, 4 Satyawadi, Sudha, 139 Scarry, Elaine, 82 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 70 Schizophrenia, 4, 21n1, 23, 39, 81, 167 Schott, Geoff, D., 64, 66, 67 Schwartz, Hillel, 188

205

Seclusion, 20–22, 45 Seldmayr, Hans, 9, 40, 46, 47, 51 Selfies, 11, 183–195 Self-imposed seclusion, 9, 18, 47 Semi-transparent, 72, 173 Semi-veiled, 179 Sense of place, 24, 25, 28, 30 Sense-data construction, 183 Shannon, Joshua, 55 Sidlauskas, Susan, 5 Sile, Agnese, 6 Silvia, Paul J., 137 Simonutti, Lauren E., 10, 159–175 Singer, Judy, 100 Skowron, Bartłomiej, 147 Smith, Kiki, 106 Snapshot, 52, 150 Snyder, Joel, 69, 77 Social isolation, 18 Socially deviant conduct, 48 Social phobia, 21 Social visibility, 170 Social withdrawal, 8, 9, 18, 20–23 Somatic language, 120–123 Somatic semiotics, 121, 133, 134 Somnambulistic state, 129 Sontag, Susan, 33, 87, 94, 100, 101, 103, 104 Spasme, 117 Spatiality, 10, 140, 146–153 Spectrum, 47, 104 Spengler, Oswald, 9, 40, 46, 47 Spirit photography, 162, 164, 166 Stereotype, 99, 133 Stigma, 100, 108, 140, 141, 148 Stillness becoming, 33–36 Submerged selves, 140 Subramanian, Karthick, 141 Suwa, M., 21 Suzuki, K., 21 Swaminathan, Jagdish, 138 Symptomatic gaze, 86–90 Szondi, Léopold, 5

206 

INDEX

T Technical accidents, 162 Technical failures, 178 Telles-Correia, Diego, 2 Temporal, 19, 24, 31–34, 36, 73, 75, 99, 108, 140, 146, 148, 150, 166, 174 Thing Theory, 98 Thys, Erik, 47 Thys, Harald, 9, 39–56 Time exposure, 150 Topo-analysis, 9, 18, 23, 28, 30, 36 Traces of absence, 61–68 Transparency, 49, 95, 96, 170, 173 Trauma, 7, 82, 98, 104, 113, 114, 122, 123, 127, 131 Trifonova, Temenuga, 5 Trigg, Dylan, 28 Twenge, M. Jean, 1 Twombly, Cy, 64 Twombly, Neil J., 64

Virgil, 185 Virilio, Paul, 178 Visual narrative, 94

U Ullrich, Wolfgang, 162, 171, 173 Uncanny, 32, 49, 96, 98, 101, 104, 140, 167 Unstable mind, 3

X Xenophobia, 47

V Vázquez, Rolando, 149 Veil, 10, 47, 107, 160, 168–173 Verfremdungseffekte, 44 Vidler, Anthony, 49 Viennese Actionism, 87

W Warli, 138, 139 Wehrle, Maren, 162 Weir Mitchell, Silas, 64 Wendell, Susan, 102 West Brett, Donna, 7 Wetherby, Isaac, 188 Wiarda, Andrea, 46, 47 Wills, David, 185 Wing, Water, 106 Withness, 176 Wójtowicz, Krzysztof, 147 Wood, Francis Derwent, 96 World Health Organization (WHO), 1, 2 Wright, Alexa, 9, 62, 63, 66–69, 71, 73, 75–78

Y Yasuma, Naonori, 22 Y Pants, 106 Yuyachkani, 151 Z Zellweger, Matthieu, 10, 159–175 Zen koan, 81