Silences

Still from Ernest Gusella, Connecticut Papoose (1981).

This essay is part of an e-flux Notes series called The Contemporary Clinic, where psychoanalysts from around the world are asked to comment on the kinds of symptoms and therapeutic challenges that present themselves in their practices. What are the pathologies of today’s clinic? How are these intertwined with politics, economy, and culture? And how is psychoanalysis reacting to the new circumstances?

***

Late one evening my son wanted to show me a video he had seen at Light Industry, a legendary theater in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That evening’s program was titled “Boredom Loops” and featured a series of videos, mostly from the nineties or early two thousands, some from the late seventies and eighties. Watching these videos, I felt something like the Gen Z worship of their parent’s youth during the birth of the internet. Early experimental video art speaks to the transition between analog and digital never to be seen again. It’s true that watching them, I immediately felt nostalgic. It’s another thing that my son feels nostalgic when he wasn’t there. What was he doing in my childhood?

The videos are chosen based on their repetitive loops, which work to get under your skin and proliferate in your mind unconsciously, mutating like a parasite. They seem like an early version of TikTok. The videos, the curator explains, replicate the comfort and discomfort of repetitive bodily phenomena. He quotes the artist Öyvind Fahlström’s Manifesto for Concrete Poetry, where repetition is said to open “unimagined possibilities” in “connection with the pulsation of breathing, the blood, ejaculation.” The manifesto, written in 1952, asks us to “SQUEEZE” language material, especially the smallest elements. When we think of the internet’s squeezing, breaking, and repatterning of language, what can we make of this avant-garde aesthetic hope? Have we fulfilled it?

Jacques Lacan, at the dawn of the decade following the May ’68 revolution, called psychoanalysis “a discourse without words.” He wanted psychoanalysis to produce a different sociality, one less predicated on the language of mastery, knowledge, and complaint. He suggested we could be more on the side of opportune silence, the falling away of fantastical expectations, the emptying of complaints and grievances, and an exit from social imaginaries. Stop all this noise pollution. As Susan Sontag notes in her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence”: “Language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made.”1 Because of this, she saw silence as increasingly exalted.

Who would not be shocked by the “too rapid and violent” pace of “global electronic communication and jet travel,” Sontag wrote almost sixty years ago. Artists are people, she says, who suffer a new ambivalence, a new revulsion towards language’s ability to “enlighten, relieve, confuse, exalt, infect, antagonize, gratify, grieve, stun, animate”… and silence.2 In the face of the invitation to say everything, anything, they have grown weary. Artists, according to Sontag, suddenly feel the wish to go silent, to not add a thing to nature.

This would be art as a spiritual project, and indeed every era must reinvent spirituality for itself. The counterbalance to this project—one that always exhausts itself eventually, creating the divide between generations—could be the resources of irony. For this reason, art is not only silent. It also babbles, plays with noise, with the disintegration of meaning and speech, with a way of doubling meaning and running it askance of itself.

Art can seek to separate language from concrete reality—speaking for the sake of speaking, art for the sake of art—meaning to remove it from common meaning, knowing, and the contrived acts of convincing by creating a rather useless and ironic exchange. There still remains the question of how far the resources of irony can be stretched. It seems unlikely that continually undermining one’s assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all.3

Sontag ends her essay on this idea of silence that finds itself equal to irony, running aground in a laugh of despair that exhausts all breath.

My son wanted me to see the ending of Ernest Gusella’s video Connecticut Papoose, a montage of many of his works made in the late seventies. The central image of the video is a woman who looks shockingly like a younger version of myself—the younger version my son must have known as a child. The image is a negativized photograph, divided geometrically, flashing spastically, as the woman changes her seated posture, looking at the camera or off into mid-distance. She has a mystical air. A stillness to her. Her pupils and hair are white and emptied of detail.

A distorted electronic voice wavers with the images, singing a poem or incantation. Perhaps it could even be a children’s book:

I have a swirling in my head traversing a tundra of alternate and optical fields, and fluctuating women have brought out the barracuda in me. My pet beaver had eaten up all my furniture, and Hindu Fakirs looked with astonishment at everything I considered normal … Too many eyes have seen and erased the images carved in stone.

Absurdist, surreal, playful, and yet spiritual, it is hard to decipher the tone of this work. Perhaps one doesn’t decipher much, which is what gives it power.

If you watch closely, what seem like still images are at times moving. The young woman blinks, her eyes seem to widen while seeing nothing, and her hand moves ever so slightly, conducting the air. I laughed as my attention was captured by the mention of hysteria. “In man-eating Meer country the reverberation of retinal and acoustical disturbances enhances hysteria. Two thousand years before aviation began, Jesus Christ set the world record for high altitude flying.”

I remember a psychoanalyst saying that the hysteric awakens from hypnosis looking for her master, waiting for a kiss. I am still waiting. “We must learn to speak in two tongues at once if we do not wish to be misunderstood. We must change tongues in mid-career without falling down to the earth.” Who survives mid-career? I’m here writing about breathing like some clichéd performance of self-CPR. I understand better needing to speak in two tongues at once, bridging the spiritual and the ironic. Can they coexist in our post-political climate catastrophe ether?

Gusella’s voice-over finally speaks about the woman we have been gazing upon:

I turned and looked at the queen of the world studying the future in the palm of her hand and I understood that affairs of the heart are really business transactions, and that what I really want was the hereafter in my very own lifetime, that’s what I want, that’s what I really want, was the hereafter in my very own lifetime, that’s what I want, that’s what I really want.

As the screen goes black, her stare remains as if you see a few final ghostly flashes. We look at her looking into the future. Even though the voice is mechanical, the repeated “really,” “want,” “hereafter,” and “lifetime” form themselves into a final prayer, a plea—almost human.

The end of Gusella’s video shifts the tone decisively, sung in a higher octave, with redoubled reverberation. This moment bridges the opposing shores of the spiritual and ironic, uniting whatever feels so irrevocably divided. Isn’t it peculiar that my son could happen upon such a relic in a theater in the year 2024? That he could present me with an old image of myself without knowing that was what he was doing?

The narrator is certainly navigating life, growing old, questioning himself. Here was my son, nostalgic for some version of me that was younger, in the imagination of himself growing older. He is approaching the age I was when I had him. What an intertwining. Whose desire is being encountered here? Does it matter?

Looking at the woman in the video, I remembered what my son’s psychoanalyst said to me once when I reported to him the complaint that he had been silent for many sessions. The psychoanalyst said that he was waiting. And by waiting silently, he meant to indicate that not everything had an immediate solution. Some things took time. For some problems in life, the only cure is time. Time is not a curse.

As for the rest of my son’s difficulties, he said, “Well, he will continue to wrestle with the ideal.” Then he looked at me with a look that only a psychoanalyst can give to another psychoanalyst. I smiled. I felt a pang of guilt. Isn’t the transmission of a powerful ideal one that always comes from the mother? The sense of what she wanted from her life but didn’t have? Did I do something wrong?

Ideals are always moral. They arrive in the place of what isn’t there—desire certainly, but a wavering image of it. Lacan links desire to lack (we desire what we don’t have) but we often forget that this duo bears a transgenerational structure; lack is passed down and passed on. We communicate ideals to our children in a way that hopefully isn’t crushing. Lacan was fond of the specific embodied traits and signifiers of desire that are picked up unconsciously, communicated unwittingly, and lived out. It could become an access point to the world and not its cover. This was held up against images of totality, perfection, and happiness that promise the enjoyment of life.

I suppose any child of mine would have to wrestle with the enormity of my desire. I also know as a psychoanalyst that a parent who desires, who hasn’t surrendered themself to the drift of enjoyment, can be a saving grace. It means encountering what the child wasn’t and couldn’t be for them. He’s not my everything, which is an important but not an easy lesson. After that, what there is, is the passage of time. Or what we might call—life.

The hereafter in my very own lifetime, that’s what I want, what I really want.

This is a companion essay to “Pollutions.” On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe is out this month from Catapult Press.