New York Transfixed: Notes on the Expression of Fear

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Aby M. Warburg, “Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region” (unpublished notes) (1923) reproduced in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 313. Michael Shulan, “Images of Democracy,” Available online: hereisnewyork.org/about/democracy.asp, accessed September 3, 2006. Shulan, “Images of Democracy,” Ibid. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4. As is well known, Freud's key grappling with the problem of trauma appears in his 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in ed. Adam Phillips, trans. John Reddick Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2003), 43–102. There is now an enormous field of “trauma studies” that is comprised of psychiatrists and psychologists who study the impact of violent events that produce a series of symptoms known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as those who engage trauma primarily as a theoretical concept that affects representation, narration, and memory. Among the most influential of these psychoanalytically influenced theorists are Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore: John's Hopkins Press, 1996); and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis trans. Jeffery Mehlman (Baltimore: John's Hopkins Press, 1976); Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999). Herman Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” Diacritics 28:4 (Winter 1998): 76. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 4. In his book on the Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevich describes a similar paradox involving traumatic disavowal and the deferred registration provided by the camera. When visiting the memorial at Nyarubuye, he describes taking photographs of the skeletons that have been left where they fell because he was unsure whether he could really see what he was seeing while he saw it. Later he quotes Alexandre, a Greek journalist who witnessed a massacre at Kibeho, one of the refugee camps that housed both perpetrators and victims. Alexandre exclaims: “I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs—then it became real.” We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), 19, 196. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1–56. One of the undeveloped questions here is about the affective difference between fear and terror—terms that I use somewhat interchangeably throughout the article. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud suggests that surprise is a key element of trauma—what he describes as “the fright” experienced by the victim. To this end he distinguishes between the words “fright,” “dread,” and “fear”: ‘Fear’ represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown. ‘Dread’ requires a specific object of which we are afraid. ‘Fright,’ however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright, and hence also against fright-induced neurosis (51). Freud has railway accidents in mind (and perhaps the shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War). Certainly the events that fall under the metonym of 9/11 possess an element of surprise and therefore represent an instance of “fright” rather than “fear.” Etymologically, “terror” comes from the Latin terrorem meaning great fear or dread. Andrea de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity: A Translation of La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, trans. Adam Kendon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Keith Thomas offers an overview of the field in his introduction to A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, eds. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). I should note that “gesture” is often reserved for those bodily expressions that are considered to be voluntary or wilful to some extent, while involuntary gesticulations such as laughing, crying, blushing, and the like are usually referred to as “expressions.” Moreover, while social historians beginning with de Jorio have shown that (voluntary) gesture is largely the product of social and cultural differences, scholars and scientists since Darwin have argued that those (involuntary) expressions pertaining to emotion are universal—shared not only among human communities around the globe but also with many nonhuman animals. In some respects, the present article is searching for a middle ground in this polarity by sketching a metapsychology of the specific (involuntary) gesture I call “transfixed.” Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), third edition with commentaries by Paul Ekman (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 278. See Ekman's notes in Darwin, Expression, 302. Darwin, Expression, 288. In fact, Darwin posits three principles to explain the nature of innate expressions: (1) “serviceable habit” by which he meant that some expressions originated in movements useful to our progenitors and were adopted through natural selection; (2) “antithesis,” which means that some expressions are used because they visibly appear opposite from the opposite emotions; and (3) as a “direct action of the nervous system,” which is explained above. Although he would rail at the thought, Darwin's measured insistence upon our animal lineage is rather reminiscent of the popular social science of physiognomy—at least in his comparison of the facial forms (if not the character) of animals and man. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 36. Freud mentions Darwin throughout his oeuvre and he raises the question of nonhuman psychology as late as “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (1940), in ed. Adam Phillips, The Penguin Freud Reader (London: Penguin, 2006), 4. I owe my phrasing here to Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 14–15. Buck-Morss very briefly describes how “three aspects of the synaesthetic system—physical sensation, motor reaction, and psychical meaning—converge in signs and gestures comprising a mimetic language. What this language speaks is anything but the concept. Written on the body's surface as a convergence between the impress of the external world and the express of subjective feeling, the language of this system threatens to betray the language of reason.” There is some debate in the psychoanalytic literature about “unconscious affect” as Freud describes it in his early metapsychology. Andre Green compactly describes the central problem as an issue of “how to make the unconscious beginnings of affective transmission conscious?” (See “On discriminating and Not-Discriminating between Affect and Representation,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80 [1999], 285). And yet I think these nine photographs offer evidence of the way in which unconscious affect may be transmitted through preverbal, nondiscursive forms such as gesture. Sigmund Freud, “An Outline of Psychoanalysis” (1940), in The Penguin Freud Reader, 13. Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989). Dora's case can be found in “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria,” in The Psychology of Love, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006): 1–110. Elizabeth von R's case is in Studies on Hysteria, trans. and eds. James and Alix Strachey (London: Penguin: 1991): 202–258. Bruno Walter writes of his own condition in Theme and Variations: An Autobiography, trans. James Galston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). I should note that Darwin, too, recognized the body as a “conductor” for emotion. Early in his book he includes this remarkable, proto-psychoanalytic passage: The most striking case, though a rare abnormal one, which can be adduced to the direct influence of the nervous system, when strongly affected, on the body, is the loss of colour in the hair, which has occasionally been observed after extreme terror or grief. One authentic instance has been recorded, in the case of a man brought out for execution in India, in which the change of colour was so rapid that it was perceptible to the eye (Expressions, 69–70). This classification of 9/11 as a “disaster” (as opposed to terrorist assault) has been confirmed by verbal testimony. Mary Marshall Clark, who has conducted an oral history project with approximately four hundred individuals in New York City and the surrounding area, found that the Pearl Harbor analogy (offered by the media) was largely rejected: “The sinking of the Titanic was an analogy used far more frequently by many we interviewed, drawing people's attention to the myth of invincibility, which was difficult to reject as a reality in both cases.” See “The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report,” The Journal of American History, 89:2 (2002). With regard to what I am calling “visual testimony,” I think one could fruitfully compare these photographs to the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg explosion, the engravings of the Lisbon earthquake (which show people with arms thrown above their heads in terror), and perhaps even the sculpted ash remains at Pompeii. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, 4. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 2005), 720. Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” 721. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, eighth edition, ed. R. E. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1296. Felman, “Education and Crisis,” 2, emphasis in original. Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August 6-September 30, 1945, trans. Warner Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 1. With the rise of the Nazis, the Warburg Institute moved to London where it was eventually incorporated in the University of London's School of Advanced Study. See Fritz Saxl, “The History of Warburg's Library,” in Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute and University of London, 1970). Some scholars argue that Warburg is the true inventor of the discipline of iconology, although Erwin Panofsky is usually cited as the founding father. These same scholars are quick to point out that iconology no longer means what it meant to Warburg in the German context of Kulturwissenschaft, and more pointedly, that Warburg's project is fundamentally distinct from the positivist discipline of iconology that has developed in American art history departments through Panofsky's influence. A short list of those scholars interested in recovering Warburg's project include Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); George Didi-Huberman, L'image survivante: histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 2002); Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone, 2004); and Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). This is Warburg's phrase taken from his 1912 lecture “Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 1999), 585. He resuscitates the phrase a decade later in his “Notes for the Kreuzlingen Lecture on the Serpent Ritual,” 313. Gertrude Bing, “A. M. Warburg,” Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965): 310. Warburg describes the “tragic scenes” of funeral rites in “Francesco Sassetti's Last Injunction to His Sons” (1907), republished in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 245. Gertrude Bing, Warburg's assistant makes this connection more evident and reprints images not included with the original essay in “A. M. Warburg” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 28 (1965): 306, 310. Warburg's unique practice of the comparative gaze would become more developed in his final project, the Mnemosyne Atlas (which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1929). The Atlas—which has been described as a symphony, an assemblage of constellations, and a laboratory of the history of images—is really the best example of unique Warburg's style of Kulturwissenshaft, however, there is simply not the space to discuss this complex project in any detail here. Ernst Gombrich describes the Atlas in the last chapter of Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970) and Charlotte Schoell-Glass takes it up in “‘Serious Issues’: The Last Plates of Warburg's Picture Atlas Mnemosyne,” in ed. Richard Woodfield, Art History as Cultural History: Warburg's Projects (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 2001): 183–208. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 38. Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 585. This phrasing follows from Barbara Hernstein Smith who defines narrative as “verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened.” See “Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories,” in ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, On Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 228. Shulan, “Images of Democracy.” Ibid.