Larger than Life
Larger than Life
The idea that art harbors a curative power is a very old one, hearkening back to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis and ancient shamanic rituals. Since, the tasks of the artist have broadened, though that of healer is still popular. Question is, does art lend itself to such a therapeutic role? Shouldn’t we be saying instead: art isn’t good for you? And where, incidentally, does the line lie between inspiration and mental breakdown?I have a project: to go mad.– Fyodor DostoyevskyWith respect to the question of whether philosophy is able to comprehend the world, or further, provide the means for its critique and possible transformation, we are nowadays faced with a peculiar twist. It is as if the world itself has gained the upper hand, and delivered back to the philosophers their own theories in distorted and mocking form. Late capitalist culture offers nothing if not a series of caricatures of many of today’s major philosophical positions. For Foucault’s ‘care of the self’, Habermas’s ‘communicative rationality’, Levinas’s ‘ethics of the Other’ and Deleuze’s ‘metaphysics of creation’, substitute the culture of narcissism with its obsessively regulated hedonism, the ideology of networking and continuous connectivity, the politics of victimization, and cognitive capitalism’s endless thirst for reinvention and the new.We are not dealing here simply with vulgar distortions of high philosophy, but rather with uncanny doubles, in part authorized by the very theories that otherwise ruthlessly denounce them. There is a masochistic dimension of Levinas’s ethics in which human subjectivity is reduced to suffering and misery (the self is above all what can be wounded); Deleuze’s mantra of positivity and concept creation fits all too well the discourse of the ad man; Foucault’s reactivation of the Renaissance ideal of the self as a work of art ironically furnishes the slogan for its total commodification; and so on.[1]
Psychobabble
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Freud. From TV talk shows to political campaigns to our intimate conversations, we are awash in a sea of therapeutic jargon and pseudo-Freudian psychobabble. We are heirs to ‘the century of the self’ (the title of Adam Curtis’s excellent 2002 documentary) in which the sciences of the soul have entered into an unholy alliance with Fifth Avenue PR executives. Freud may be out of fashion in scientific circles, but his impact on culture and our spontaneous self-conception can hardly be overestimated. At the end of his influential 1959 study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, Philip Rieff predicted the rise of ‘psychological man’; a few years later, in a book of the same name, he declared the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’. Rieff defined this cultural shift by a massive inward turn. A new emphasis on private life and individual well-being corresponded with the decline of traditional frameworks, like religion and community, which oriented human existence, as well as rising living standards and greater sexual permissiveness. Homo psychologicus enjoyed unparalleled freedom and a new world of pleasures, yet at the same time was beset by anxiety and existential uncertainty. Critical studies by Richard Sennett and Christopher Lasch dissected this new subjective form and its attendant pathologies. Robert Castel notably coined the term ‘therapy of the normal’ to designate the diffusion of clinical techniques to society at large. Therapy became the new compass for the now-adrift soul. No longer reserved for risky populations, it started ministering to the needs of the everyman, including ‘intensity training for “human potential”, development techniques for “relationship capital”, and the production of a psychological mass culture which is devoured by craving consumers like the analogues of a lost sociability.’[2] Much of the current criticism of therapy culture is decidedly reactionary, ridiculing New Age imbecilities and the reign of life coaches and emotional gurus, while looking back nostalgically to the good old days of stoicism and self-reliance. Psychoanalysis is typically criticized – in part, justifiably – for its role in the rise of the therapy industry. The question, however, is whether psychoanalysis ought simply to be condemned as the ‘cure which is a disease’, as Karl Kraus once quipped, or whether it possesses the necessary theoretical resources for a critique of the therapeutic, beyond the stale alternatives of flaccid emotionalism and the stiff upper lip.
American Buddhism
What becomes of art in the age of therapy? The idea that art harbours a curative power is a very old one, hearkening back to Aristotle’s theory of catharsis and ancient shamanic rituals. In modern times the belief in art’s therapeutic value receives a powerful reinterpretation. Of the many roles inhabited by the artist of late – visionary, mystic, experimenter, revolutionary, prankster, dandy, drinker, celebrity, businessman – healer is certainly one of the most fundamental. The avant-gardes, as Donald Kuspit reminds us, conceived of their work precisely as a privileged form of therapy to rejuvenate an ailing and decadent society.[3] ‘Life reborn through art’ was their rallying cry, and in the pan-creative vision of Duchamp and Beuys, everyone was an artist and the world ready to be remade (compare this utopianism with the dialectical subtlety of a Pierre Bismuth, for whom art and life never quite fall together: ‘Everybody is an artist but only the artist knows it.’) Though Kuspit focuses his critical attention on the demise of this ideal and the cynical narcissism of so-called postmodern art, we should note that there was something fishy about the avant-garde’s therapeutic intentions from the start. Take Dada. The contradictions involved in the conjunction of ‘art and therapy’ are clearly on display in this most contradictory of (anti-) art movements. On the one hand, Dada is a thoroughly negative and nihilistic expression of the bankruptcy of European civilization – the insanity and incoherence of Dada is first and foremost a mirror held up to the madness of ‘normal’ bourgeois life. But there is also a lesser-known positive side to Dada, which endeavoured to revive and re-enchant the broken postwar world. Consisting of a hodgepodge of philosophical, religious and mystical ideas, Dadaist therapy can have a rather ‘New Agey’ ring. Richard Huelsenbeck’s programmatic statement ‘Dada is the American side of Buddhism, it raves because it knows how to be silent, it acts because it is in a state of rest’ seems the very formula of triumphant 21st-century globalization, combining the best of Eastern wisdom and Western know-how: frantic modernity together with inner peace and tranquillity (or ‘creative indifference’ in Huelsenbeck’s preferred phrase).[4]
Dis-adaptation
As much as art and therapy are linked historically, it is more telling, especially today, to set them in opposition. As art brut specialist Michel Thévoz writes: ‘Art proceeds from a heuristic dis-adaptation, whereas therapy aims at a re-adaptation.’[5] What does this mean? In one of his case histories, Freud warns against having specific expectations of analytic treatment. The man who brings his neurotic wife to therapy in order to restore their marital happiness, or the parents who ask the doctor to cure their child of unruliness are bound to be disappointed. The problem is not that analysis doesn’t ‘work’, but that it doesn’t respond to such demands – freed from her inhibitions, the wife leaves her husband, and once the analysis is terminated the child goes its own way all the more decidedly.[6] Put simply, psychoanalysis is not about conforming to this or that image of the good, whether it comes from society, one’s family or lover, one’s analyst, or even the person him- or herself. It does not endeavour to make life run more smoothly (whatever that may mean). Its aim is altogether more obscure and unpredictable. Perhaps you could call it the liberation of desire, as long as the latter term is not confounded with socially mandatory hedonism. Desire is, rather, something that throws a monkey wrench into the works, something absolutely imperative yet maddeningly difficult to endure. Freud offered many models of the psyche throughout his career but one thing remained constant: the dramatic character of desire. Instead of promising a happy integration, analysis involves a tragic encounter with lack and conflict – a bitter and not so marketable pill. Now, from this quick resumé it is already clear that Freudian therapy is ideologically opposed to what is typically understood by therapy. Therapy is usually defined in Thévoz’s manner, as a kind of normalization or adaptation, but even this is a tricky point. Normality isn’t as normal as it used to be: the 1950’s model of conformist, one-dimensional man has long since ceded to the self-realization of the autonomous individual. To be normal is to be different, creative, expressive, performative. The underlying pressure exerted by self-help culture is summed up by the ubiquitous injunction: Be yourself! Find your inner you, realize your hidden potentials, and reinvent your life.[7]A properly anti-therapeutic therapy would aim to relieve this pressure of compulsory selfhood (Lacan said that psychoanalysis involves ‘subjective destitution’), and find ways to transgress the ideals of performance and inventiveness bound to the demands of capitalist novelty. Perhaps the authentic figure of desire today is exhaustion: that would be a good starting point for a new critical theory. In a similar way, art proceeds from a dis-adaptation: it is not about making things run better. On the contrary, its very existence testifies to a gap in culture, a kind of ‘discontent’ or disruption or breakdown in the established order. At a time when contemporary art is more and more associated with positive democratic values like fostering openness – meaning creation, sociability, etc. – it is imperative to recall its essentially ‘unhealthy’, risky dimension. Against the liberal consensus, it would be better to say: Art is no good for you. It can ruin your mind, kill your relationships, drive you to despondency. And in fact these dangers are well known, at least since the Greeks, who closely associated art with madness. The question is: Is artistic madness a good, ‘divine’ mania or a bad, destructive one? Where is the line between inspiration and cracking up? In contemporary philosophy, this was a major problem for Gilles Deleuze, who developed an original conception of art as psychosis. One could even say that the issue of ‘art and therapy’ is at the forefront of Deleuze’s thought. Put briefly, Deleuze holds that controlled schizophrenia is itself the cure for the forces that menace life, the bad (neurotic) lunacy of personal identity. The identical self and the structures that sustain it are the cause of man’s most fundamental sickness. Deleuzian philosophy thus champions a movement of de-personalization, opening onto a more profound anonymous life of scattered molecules, piercing sensations, and aleatory events – to sketch this delirious ‘line of flight’ is the primary mission of art. The difficulty here, elided by Deleuze’s more enthusiastic disciples, is the romanticization of psychopathology: the flowing praise of madness seems at times to take all the sting out of it. If undoing the chains of selfhood is the goal of schizophrenic (anti-) therapy, what prevents the subject from being truly, and horribly, split asunder?
Madness
Another possible response to ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ – perhaps the most intelligent one available today – is the strategy of over-identification: conforming to the dictates of therapy culture without reserve, to the point of absurdity. This strategy is deployed most effectively in the work of Mike Kelley, who affirms the discourse of victimization as the unsurpassable horizon of our time: ‘I think we’re living in a period in which victim culture and trauma are the rationale for everything. Especially in pop psychology, childhood trauma is the motivation behind every action.’[8] Kelley’s conclusion was in part motivated by the critical reception of his own early works with old stuffed dolls; though he was explicitly concerned with formal issues, they were invariably interpreted in crude psycho-biographic terms, as indicative of some abuse or trauma in the artist’s past. He responded by relaying the message back to its senders: Kelley set about constructing ‘a unifying aesthetic system […] based on repressed-memory syndrome.’[9] This turned out to be a massive multiform project, some of whose components include: Education Complex (1995), an architectural model of all the educational institutions Kelley attended constructed from memory, with gaps left in areas he couldn’t remember (repressed); Sublevel (1998), a representation of the basement of Cal Arts, one of Kelley’s schools, with a maze lined with eerie pink crystals and a tunnel leading to a torture chamber; and Timeless/Authorless (1995), a series of fictional high school newspapers in which found pictures of student theatrical productions are juxtaposed with texts describing recovered memories of sexual abuse. What we are presented with is a vast and meticulous panorama of the therapeutic unconscious, an artistic homage to the seduction theory and a literalization of the dark fantasies surrounding the American school experience.As remarked above, one of the paradoxes of psychoanalytic therapy is that it doesn’t really aim to help people, at least not in a direct way. The cure, according to Freud, is best envisaged as a side effect. Getting better is more a happy accident than an end-in-itself. ‘The removal of the symptoms of the illness is not specifically aimed at, but is achieved, as it were, as a by-product if the analysis is properly carried through.’[10]This could be viewed as another proof of the folly of psychoanalysis, and there are certainly quicker and easier ways to alleviate one’s suffering (drugs, CBT, hypnosis, art therapy). Nevertheless, there is a lesson here that is relevant for contemporary art practice: just as the analytic procedure is in a way insensitive to and unconcerned by its own good effects, so should art remain aloof to its therapeutic intentions. Art needs a goal other than therapy – and if there is something alive in art today, it is because it has found an aspiration beyond coping.
Aaron Schuster
