[-empyre-] screen and desire

[Sean Cubitt]

To Erkki and renate: best for the shows! Perhaps it makes clear that old technologies don't have to be replaced!

thanks for the Laplanche too: and the fine thought about alternatives that orient to the future

I will try to be less pessimistic -- in future

sean

On 24 Jul 2012, at 16:32, Timothy Conway Murray wrote:

> Thanks so much, Sean.  This is really an interesting summary of screen media's relation to screen memory.  One reason that Renate's been so quiet on the list this summer is because she's preparing work for a multimedia show at the Freud Museum in London in September, with one piece being entitled, "Screen Memories."  This is a piece that toggles between digitized Super 8 footage of home movies, various narratives about the paternal relation to home movies, and sound tracks that include the whirling of the Super 8 projector (a sound that in itself is becoming something of an historical enigma) and the disintegration of the brittle Super 8 footage as she screened it one final time for digitization.  Here the effect of screening was literally to enact something akin to the death drive through which the marvel of artistic production resulted.
> 
> I think I might have mentioned on the list earlier in the month that I've been inclined to draw a parallel between the uncertain internalizations of digital scansion (which often doesn't recognize the symbolic system being scanned into the machine) and the procedure of what Laplanche calls 'traumatophilia' through which internalized 'enigmatic signifiers' [that is, we know that they signify but not what] are regenerated artistically and symbolically with new energy and force.  But the result might skip a beat or a register from the initial internalized sign.  The screen provides the mediation of passage for this translation.
> 
> Regarding the relation to the future, I like to think of this result not as the production of a "possible future" with utopian potential but, in your words, as more of an alternate world awaiting inscription in the future.  In his sense, rather than screening us from trauma and anxiety, screens facilitate the production of emergent symbolics deriving from the energetics of "traumatophilia."  
> 
> I apologize to the non-theory members of the list since I realize that this is all rather dense and abstract, and a very brief summary of 4 long seminars of Laplanche, but I think it's very cool how our thoughts about the virtual nature of screening seem to converge.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Tim
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> A. D. White House
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York. 14853
> ________________________________________
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Sean Cubitt [sean.cubitt at unimelb.edu.au]
> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2012 9:19 AM
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: [-empyre-] screen and desire
> 
> A brief aside on scott's brief aside
> 
> There's certainly something psychoanalytic; and it certainly involves the
> screen metaphor: but it may be that our screen architectures are more
> involved with the repetition compulsion, the entropic side of the instinct
> to order our environments. The repetitive iteration of pixels is noise,
> like any repetition: in this it is a map of Flusser's idea of human
> photographers as functionaries of the photographic apparatus; only now
> each pixel is subject to the logic of running through all possible
> options. The process is only abbreviated by reducing 'redundant'
> differences through codec organisation in blocks, macroblocks and Groups
> of Blocks. This is how to understand the screen metaphor as akin to
> Freud's 'screen memories', which in psychoanalysis stand between
> consciousness and traumatic repressed memories.
> 
> In some respects, screens operate on our behalf the same repression of
> trauma as would otherwise be done by the unconscious. One question then is
> about the socialisation (and automation) of unconscious processes
> 
> The second concerns the reaction against socialised and automated
> repression. The cost of repressing traumatic memories is, as Agamben
> argues in the book on Method, is to repress experience, repress in effect
> the present. The reaction, from Heidegger to new age 'mindfulness', is to
> return to presence. But the presence to which we return  is (newly)
> anthropocentric, shaped by its passage through automation, and deprived of
> both memory (because it is the fruit of repression) and therefore of the
> kind of processual temporality which creates virtuality - orientation
> towards the future.
> 
> In response to this reaction, screen media have seized upon a limited
> conception of the virtual as their proper domain: the production of
> imaginary scenarios, as ever a proper function of consciousness, but in
> contemporary media presented increasingly not as possible futures but as
> alternate worlds - ie without the utopian potential (which would of course
> require the kind of future-orientation which produces also anxiety).
> 
> Screens screen us from trauma and anxiety, but in doing so can only filter
> the imagination of perpetual presence.
> 
> (it isn't the grid as such, though that is a challenge, but the
> transitions between ubiquity and universality that are the problem
> 
> On 23/07/2012 04:52, "Scott Mcquire" <mcquire at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>> A brief aside to Sean
>> 
>> "In the scanned screen, completion is permanently held out as presence,
>> and
>> permanently denied -- a dialectic of the unstable attept to construct a
>> permanent present."
>> 
>> Sounds a bit like the screen as desire in the Lacanian of lack?
>> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>