I am reading _Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Antomy
of the Image_ by Hans Bellmer. This is the English translation of his
only text, relating more or less to his artistic practice. I read it
quickly before, now more slowly. It is a skeleton key to cyberspace.
Bellmer begins:
"I believe that the various modes of expression: postures, gestures,
actions, sounds, words, the creation of graphics or object... all result
from the same set of psycho-physiological mechanisms and obey the same
law of birth. The basic expression, one that has no preconceived
objective, is a reflex. To what need, to what physical impulse does it
respond?
For example, among all the various reflexes provoked by a toothache,
let us examine the violent contraction of the muscles of the hand and
fingers, a contraction so intense it compels the fingernails to pierce
the skin. This clenched fist is an artificial focal point of excitation,
a virtual 'tooth' that creates a diversion by directing the flow of
blood and nerve impulses away from the actual center of pain to lessen
it. The toothache is thus divided in half at the hand's expense. The
visible expression that results is its 'logical pathos.'
Ought we to conlcude from this that the most violent as well as the
most imperceptivle reflexive bodily change - whether occuring in the
face, a limb, the tongue, or a muscle - would be simply explicable as a
propensity to confuse and bisect a pain through the creation of a
virtual center of excitement? This can be regarded as a certainty, which
thereby compels us to imagine the desired continuity of our expressive
life in the form of a series of deliberate transports leading from the
malaise to its image. Expression with its pleasure component is a
displaced pain and a deliverance."
Now, in describing these virtual centers of excitement - we might say,
nodes or links, intensities in the net - Bellmer invokes a mapping (or
raster) of "perceptually mobile interoceptive diagrams." He emphasizes
the oddness or perversity of these diagrams. They are built around the
permissable and forbidden, around superimpositions and representations,
in short, by -jectivities and coding process leading to amalgams such as
Bellmer's famous doll or the "sex-armpit" he uses as an example in this
book. The process is two-fold: introjection of the dangerous object,
then projection onto perception (and onto organs of perception; "the
image of sex having slid over the eye"). We do not see images of the
virtual but we see with the virtual. The body images seen are images of
my body. "I see" means "I see with myself." This virtualization and
mapping occurs at all sites of experience, where the superhuman quality
of perception through part objects results from the projected body, e.g.
"the power to see with one's hand," as the mouse/hand crosses the screen
is like the toothache Bellmer begins with.
Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel describes Bellmer's art (and so his theory of
the image) as "a universe submitted to the total abolitions of the
limits between the objects and even between their molecules, a universe
which has become totally malleable ('Anything can be done')." We should
apply this description to the cool neutrality of the digital. Elsewhere
she adds: "In the universe I am describing, the world has been engulged
in a gigantic grinding machine (the digestive tract) and has been
reduced to homogeneous excremental particles. Then all is equivalent.
The distinction between 'before' and 'after' has disappeared, as, too,
of course, has history."
Bellmer's model for analyzing the image and the physical unconscious is
linguistic. He invokes palindromes, where reversibility is the mechanism
of pleasure rather than meaning. He intends this as the correlate of the
image-amalgam (e.g. "sex-armpit") as virtual center of excitement.
Physical reflex disappears into the image; in fact, the image is the
absence of the reflex, and its virtuality and excitement are built on
this absence. The image is cleansed of the body but just this makes the
entire image a sexual hieroglyph. We are dealing with a perverse
mechanism, in Chasseguet-Smirgel's terms, where the image seen only
confirms the machine that we inhabit. Here, the binding and totalizing
effect of symbolic processes becomes the source of value. The parallel,
I think, is the continuous stream of ascii characters as an end in
itself, or the fetishization of algorithmic processing in digital
poetry.
I finished the first chapter. I'll read the next one later and comment
more (where there's additional discussion, I think, of language -
specifically anagrams - and I'll consider this in relation to
Baudrillard's symbolic exchange theory).
Sandy
