White Screen Circa 1900

THE WHITE SCREEN CIRCA 1900— ON THE MOVING IMAGE AS POTENTIALITY OF THOUGHT PASI VÄLIAHO

Léonce Perret’s 1912 film Le mystère des Roches de Kador presents one of the most beautiful shots in the early history of cinema: the female protagonist, Suzanne, shrinks away from a white screen filled with light in front of her and eventually faints (see Figure 1). In the film’s story, Suzanne has fallen into an amnesic and catatonic state due to a traumatic experience of a shooting incident taken place at a rough seashore, where Suzanne’s cousin who is jealously in love with her has attempted to shoot her fiancé. She is treated by a Professor Williams with a “new cinematographic method in psychotherapy,” which consists of restaging and recording the traumatic event and then showing the film to the patient. The scene in question displays the screening of the film, after which Suzanne becomes cured and regains her capacity to speak, recollect, and act. Most importantly, Suzanne recovers her “faculty” of language, a faculty that in the history of Western thought has been approached as that of articulate and meaningful speech essentially characterizing the “living being that has logos” (to zôon logon ekhon) (e.g., Aristotle 2002, De Interpretatione 16a27-29). The shot itself, however, is interesting in its muteness or speechlessness; it lacks communication, and what actually occurs is action between agency and pure passiveness. On the other hand, what is essential is how Suzanne recoils after the film ends and the projector illuminates the screen, and consequently, there is nothing to be seen but bare “imagelessness.” Just as there are no words, in a sense images are also absent (or, rather, what the actual image attempts to bring forth is the absence of any image). What does Suzanne then “see”? Kador suggests that she faces her own forgetting.1 In the story, Suzanne has been passed out during the original traumatic event due to a sleeping 1For the following treatment, see Trond Lundemo’s analysis of Kador in “Technologies of Forgetting.”

© symploke¯

Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2 (2007) ISSN 1069-0697, 40-65.

symploke¯

41

potion her cousin has put in her tea. Therefore, she does not have actual perceptions or memory traces about the event. Rather, those memories come into existence only afterwards through the filmic repetition of the event. This means that Professor William’s film itself is Suzanne’s memory about the event she has never consciously experienced. The film does not function as the mere retention of personally experienced past events but as the impersonal and non-subjective “tracing” of her memory—as the other inside her, one that she would never have been able to recollect. In this way, the film yields forgetting in the sense that there is nothing to remember, and the white screen eventually displays Suzanne’s amnesia. What Suzanne is exposed to is her amnesia.

Figure 1: Le mystère des Roches de Kador, a film by Léonce Perret. Production Gaumont, 1912. Collection Musée Gaumont.

Thereby, the scene in Kador proposes how logos in fact essentially relates to the absence of any mnemic content, any actual image or word. Ultimately, this absence points to death, not, however, as bare negation but in the sense of a fissure in time that opens up to the transcendental that exceeds pure presence, to another dimension distant and diverging from—yet intrinsic to and implicated in—the immediately given.2 In the white screen, Suzanne is eventually exposed to her own death, to that See Serres (72-75).

2

42

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

which exceeds presentation in actual words, images and sounds. Martin Heidegger notes how death and language are fundamentally connected with each other, as “experiencing” (erfahren) death seems to be constitutive of the living being that has logos in contrast to animals which can neither experience death as death nor speak (215). “Having logos” is thus freed from the objectivity or the subjectivity of the empirical and relates to a metaphysical dimension. In this respect, however, it should not be regarded as being in opposition to memory as such.3 Accordingly, in Kador the immemorial white screen of death in fact encircles Suzanne’s very potentiality to remember, in other words, pure memory. The filmic simulation of Suzanne’s recollections suggests how the moving image is memory itself, that which it is impossible to remember and with regard to which we are to remain amnesic, since memory always already escapes and exceeds recollection for the reason that it makes recollection possible. The scene with the white screen crystallizes the following fact: Suzanne’s process of recollection and regaining of speech begin after the moving image “redeems” her memory; after Suzanne confronts her own forgetting, her incapacity to remember, before the empty screen on which no image, no memorytrace, appears. That is because the white screen of forgetting or the impotentiality to have memories is purely potential memory. What Suzanne is exposed to is memory as such. To follow Gilles Deleuze’s argument in Cinema 2, the scene displays how the cinema becomes “cerebral” by giving rise to a “strange faculty which puts into immediate contact the outside and the inside,” that is, the image and the psyche, so that the image becomes an absolute outside of the psyche, in other words, its absolute inside (204, 221). This kind of an image is “double sided, mutual, both actual and virtual . . . to the extent that there is no longer any linkage of the real and the imaginary, but indiscernibility of the two, a perpetual exchange” (273). What is this “strange faculty”? Generally speaking, a faculty is a power, a capacity, a potentiality. As such, Giorgio Agamben points out, faculty signals the presence of an absence, its own privation (1999, 178-179). The faculty of memory is not simply a capacity to remember but also not to remember; the faculty of thought is a capacity both to think and not to think. Not-to remember or think can be further characterized as “unconscious” like that which is forgotten or unthought. Memory or thought, in other words, always already relates to its outside, which in fact is its most intimate inside in the sense that the outside encircles the contours of memory or thought, the very capacity to remember or think. Now that the moving image takes hold of the unconscious, the forgotten and the unthought, it simultaneously engenders a sphere of potentiality to See Deleuze (1994, 84-85).

3

symploke¯

43

remember and to think.4 This, fundamentally, is the strange faculty it generates. Thereby, it is suggested how the moving image becomes potentiality of memory and thought, how the moving image enfolds a sphere of sayability, a capacity to “have logos”—a sphere emblematized by the immemorial white screen, which incorporates the absence of any actual image and, ultimately, death. The scene in Kador points to a specific virtual dimension that the moving image enfolds. It could be even said that it points to the moving image as something immortal and eternal, or at least “untimely,” which in fact constitutes the capacity we mortals have to experience our own mortality and thus be able to think and speak. This suggests that the image enfolds and discloses what Deleuze calls a transcendental field that “neither refers to an object nor belongs to a subject,” that is to say, is neither an actual image nor a mental representation (1997, 3). In this way, the moving image functions as a diagram of thought; it becomes an image of thought, an image that defines the sense and direction of thought.5

The Crystal-Image In the genesis of conceptual thought, or what is given as “sayable,” the virtual dimension of the moving image becomes tangible in an epistemological change: the emergence of psychodynamic theories of the so-called speaking animal, most notably psychoanalysis in Sigmund Freud. What characterizes psychodynamics is the view that memory is not a mere property among others (Hacking 198-209). A crucial point also thematized in Kador is that memory is seen as constituting selfhood and thus providing a key to the “soul,” whence the status of memory itself simultaneously becomes problematic. This means that psychodynamics subscribes to a view according to which forgetting actually constitutes our psychical existence. That which is forgotten, the unconscious as a special sort of temporal fabric, turns into a new kind of epistemic entity and is seen as the very essence of the psyche. What then becomes an object of knowledge is not the living being as a nonconscious neurophysiological apparatus like La Mettrie’s man-machine, a reflex automaton, re-emerging in Jean-Martin Charcot, one that would 4The moving image thus concerns what Deleuze calls “transcendental memory,” which is defined in terms of “an essential forgetting” as the power or potentiality to remember: “Forgetting is no longer a contingent incapacity separating us from a memory which is itself contingent: it exists within essential memory as though it were the ‘nth’ power of memory with regard to its own limit or to that which can only be recalled” (1994, 140). 5See Deleuze and Guattari (39-40)

44

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

be knowable through the cinematic reproduction of its gestures and poses. Memory, or the unconscious, is not regarded as an epistemological entity that would become known through anatomical or experimental scrutinizing by means of various technologies of vision. Instead, according to psychodynamics, the unconscious—the autoaffecting and sovereign realm of the psyche that consists of forgetfulness—expresses itself in language, or more precisely, in the automatisms of writing and speech. While Albert Londe “photochronographs” Blanche Wittman, a famous patient of Charcot’s, at the Salpêtrière and ends up cutting up as well as doubling the modulation of sensibility by means of magnets, Jules Janet observes in 1888 that Wittman’s somatic troubles, anesthesia and analgesia, are actually due to the dissociation of her ego; Blanche’s sufferings are caused by her malevolent second personality, Blanche 2. In this change towards a dynamic conception of the psyche, it is especially Jules Janet’s brother’s, Pierre Janet’s work that marks a crucial cornerstone. It disengages from an anatomical-physiological explanation of neuroses and opens up a psychological view upon them. For Pierre Janet, it is memory that constitutes the psyche and personality, whereby the psyche becomes not so much a spatial as a temporal problem. Henri F. Ellenberger even characterizes that a leitmotiv piercing through Janet’s writings is that of a “time travel,” that is, a notion that the past in its entirety exists in the present (353). Central in Janet’s early work is the notion of “psychological automatism,” which refers to unconscious states and actions—elementary sensorimotor and mnemic images— which are not integrated in an individual’s personality; they are not conscious in the sense that they do not form a part of a personal judgment (223-69, 303-14, 335-45). Janet coins the term subconscious (subconscience) in order to explain the existence of psychical phenomena, actions, thoughts, memories, outside consciousness: these kinds of phenomena follow an autonomous and “automatic” development in the subconscious. As the automatisms escape conscious control, “fixed ideas” in memory revive and emerge to the surface. What happens is the dissociation of personality, which separates the memories that constitute personality from consciousness and leads to simultaneous existence of multiple personalities expressing themselves through automatic writing, for example. Generally speaking, a decisive step in the conception of the dynamic view of the psyche is that fragmented images out of conscious control are not regarded as solely following neurophysiological conditions that would be referable and figurable in their apparent visibility. Rather, diverse layers of psychical existence are given a certain kind of consistence themselves in the disclosure of a temporality, which does not apply to the cinematographical cutting up of the body according to

symploke¯

45

discrete instants. In this regard, the often purported epistemological shift taking place especially in Freud from “looking to listening” can be seen as an emblematic one. While Charcot, the great seer, gives no significance to hysterics’ “incessant babbling,” Freud on the contrary clings to these perhaps nonsensical utterances stressing the importance of verbally produced phenomena. Hysterics’ word-formation is to be taken seriously and made sensible. On the other hand, this shift to language rests on a more fundamental view regarding the temporal constitution of the psyche—it is memory that puts up our psychical existence. As in Janet’s work, in Freud the focus of perception and theory becomes displaced from the surface of the body to the depth of memory and the patient’s personal history; instead of cutting into the time of the nervous apparatus, pathogenic psychical material is to be cleared away “layer by layer” by penetrating “into deeper layers of . . . memories” (2001i, 139). The novel kind of perception and conceptualization of the psyche thus moves from a spatial plane of reference to a framework constructed around temporality, one that, in consequence, is fundamentally invisible, even to technological simulation. This temporal framework is cunningly brought forth in the scene of Le mystère de Roches de Kador, simultaneously suggesting how the moving image nevertheless contributes in an essential manner to its perception and conception. Indeed, to follow Deleuze, the temporality of the moving image by no means reduces to the linear succession of discrete moments, but it may amount to what Deleuze calls the “direct presentation of time” or the crystal-image (1989, 78-83). This means that the image encompasses the operation of time that Deleuze, basing on Henri Bergson, understands as being constituted on how time splits into two heterogeneous directions that differ from each other in kind: the present that passes and, at the same time, the past that is preserved. The first direction is the actual unfolding of time, launched towards and anticipating the future as the present already becomes another present. The second direction signals how time enfolds itself, wraps around itself, forming an abyss of vast temporal circuits that are preserved as virtuality in the present. It constitutes pure memory or pure recollection but, from a subjective viewpoint, also inevitably forgetfulness and, furthermore, otherness within the in-dividual. It constitutes pure past, which is a time that has never been lived and should, thus, not be confused with psychological recollection; it is time that is not ours but that is “in us,” internal to us, the inexorably forgotten that founds memory and enables us to conceive and speak about such an entity as memory. Now, even though pure memory surely cannot be presented by any actual image, Deleuze argues that it is precisely this incessant splitting of time that the moving image has the capacity to transpose: “[T]he crystal constantly exchanges the two distinct images which

46

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

constitute it, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved . . . . The crystal always lives at the limit, it is itself the ‘vanishing limit between the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet . . .’” (81). For Deleuze, in the irreversible course of unfolding images, a rupture may occur, one in which the present image finds its contemporaneous past in a virtual mirror image and a limit point becomes established at which the present and the past even become confused and indiscernible. It is precisely this liminal state that the scene in Kador structurally explores by constructing a series of reflective surfaces between the actual image, the past brought forth and repeated by the cinematographic apparatus, and, perhaps most importantly, the immemorial white screen as an idea of pure memory or pure virtual image. In the history of cinema, the temporality analyzed by Deleuze in terms of the crystal-image also becomes thematized—although not directly structurally scrutinized—from quite early on by all the Doppelgängers and split personalities haunting in Max Mack’s The Other (Der Andere) (1913), Paul Wegener’s The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag) (1912), and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari) (1919), among others. The scene at the Jewish cemetery in The Student of Prague, for example, presents a flashing moment in which virtual forces emerging from the depths of memory unfold and become incarnated in the image. At this moment, it is not a matter of voluntary action in which, according to Bergson, “[t]he objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them” (21). Rather, action jerks and even halts, and movement is interrupted. The rupture in the course of action evokes the past, which subsists independently as virtual images contemporaneous with the present situation. Time splits in the interval, and Balduin confronts his virtual double, a vast memory–circuit, in a mirror. One could say that in the intervals of these Dobbelgänger shots, the moving image incorporates Marcel Proust’s souvenir involontaire in which “extra-temporal” being is opened up. In Time Regained, Marcel—who in several occasions speculates on how diverse layers of time give rise to different but simultaneous personalities—is thrown to his musing: The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. (221-23)

symploke¯

47

To put it in Proustian terms, the medium unfolding “outside time” in which the extra-temporal being dwells is nothing else but the moving image. This, as we have seen, is exemplified by the scene in Kador and, on the other hand, also by Doppelgänger shots in The Student of Prague: when Balduin confronts his double at the cemetery, he actually encounters the figure of what he has always already forgotten, the “being within him” which emerges from the abyss of time and returns as the other. In the interval between the two Balduins, the moving image transposes forgetfulness—that is, the very fabric of memory—to its own mediality. What thus determines both the crystal-image and the dynamic view of the psyche, and “structurally” connects the two with each other, is the problem of temporal repetition, more precisely, the way in which the past is conserved and repeated in the present. It is this problematic field regarding temporality, memory, and the psyche that also shapes the emergence of psychoanalysis. From early on, Freud approaches the psyche in terms of the “outside time,” observing, for example, how the analysis of (hysterical) symptoms manifesting in the present requires the gradual exposing of underlying “scenes” or memories. In outlining his views in 1897, Freud draws a diagram (see Figure 2) and explains: [S]ome of the scenes are accessible directly, but others only by way of phantasies set up in front of them. The scenes are arranged in order of increasing resistance: the more slightly repressed ones come to light first, but only incompletely on account of their association with the severely repressed ones. The path taken by [analytic] work first goes down in loops to the scenes or to their neighbourhood; then from a symptom little deeper down, and then again from a symptom deeper still. Since most of the scenes converge on the few symptoms, our path makes repeated loops through the background thoughts of the same symptoms. (2001g, 250-51)

Crucially, in this outline the psyche is considered as becoming knowable in a kind of a crystal image, one that would operate a perpetual loop-like exchange between the present (the symptom) and the past or memory (the scene). These loops bring us to a salient problem regarding temporality and recurrence or repetition that marks Freud’s thinking as a whole, as becomes evident when Freud after the First World War revises his views about our instinctual life by observing that it is also patterned after an insistent “‘perpetual recurrence of the same thing’” (2001a, 22). Accordingly, Freud’s thought encounters the moving image, as both point towards the same direction of thought as to the nature of memory and temporality. In other words, the emergence of the moving image

48

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

and that of Freud’s thought coincide in terms of a shared problematic field. This suggests how by some of its major postulates psychoanalysis in fact presupposes the moving image as its problematic element. The presupposition amounts to how the moving image functions as a capacity to think of a new temporally related “epistemic thing” called the unconscious or, more generally, “psychical reality,” and, furthermore, how this capacity manifests itself first and foremost in terms of the paradoxical status that the moving image enjoys in Freud’s epistemology.

Figure 2: Freud’s diagram, dated May 25, 1897. Acknowledgements: Sigmund Freud © Copyrights, The Institute of Psycho-Analysis and The Hogarth Press for permission to use diagram of “Draft M” from Pre-PsychoAnalytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts from vol. 1 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytic Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. and The Perseus Books Group.

The Writing-Pad The encounter between the moving image and Freud’s thought is, however, by no means unambiguous. In his theoretical writings, Freud remains stubbornly silent about the cinema. The word “kino” (“moving pictures”) occurs only in letters or postcards. In a letter dated September 22, 1907, Freud writes from Piazza Colonna in Rome how cinematographic performances get him “spellbound” (der Zauber zu wirken) among the crowd waiting for the repetition of the technological spectacle—a repetition reminiscent of the way in which Freud conceives mnemic material recurring “beyond the pleasure principle” (2003, 22427). Yet in addition to appealing to the scopic drive, the moving image does not seem to carry out any other kind of function. Epistemologically speaking, it even appears to be deprived of logos, that is, the rationality

symploke¯

49

that Freud was to transfer to our perception and conceptualization of the unconscious.6 This negative attitude becomes evident in relation to the so-called film affair in 1925, when Berlin-based psychoanalysts Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs agree to cooperate with the UFA Company in producing a popular scientific film about psychoanalysis, G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of the Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele) (1926). In response to Abraham and Sachs’ solicitation to authorize the project, Freud withdraws and states, “I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible” (Abraham and Freud 547). The problem for him is that the unconscious is not figurable (darstellbar). The moving image does not seem to have the capacity to transpose the singular thoughts about the psyche that are usually attributed to Freud’s theorization of psychoanalysis. Mary Ann Doane points out that Freud’s negative attitude is due to his understanding of the cinema as lacking a certain aspect of “legibility” or rationality: instead of being capable of differentiating and thus amenable to abstraction, the cinema, by the fundamentals of its technological configuration, possibly records everything and thus brings about an excess of the accidental and the “irrational” (61-68). In other words, cinematic presentation, which in its mechanics does not select and reduce as human perception and consciousness does, appears to be too singular, material and contingent to generate differentiating apperception. It appears to simply repeat, without differentiation. For Freud, linguistic expression exclusively proves amenable to rationalization; the talking cure, for example, is to exorcize hysterics’ painful memory-pictures by putting them into words so that the picture would vanish “like a ghost that has been laid” (2001i, 280-81). Yet with regard to this mechanical, impersonal, and accidental recording of random “data” with which the moving image is identified here, an ambiguous element already inheres in Freud’s epistemology. This is because the epistemology itself is methodically based on appropriating the accidental, the incoherent and unstructured by adhering to what Freud calls suspended attention.7 In the talking-cure situation or in self-analysis, one must reduce critical and selective mental activity in order to objectively record and apprehend the singular and 6Surely, the (static) image does manifest psychical forces and thus may become an object of analysis in terms of opening up a gateway to the psyche. In Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Freud writes, “Kindly nature has given the artist the ability to express his most secret mental impulses, which are hidden even from himself, by means of the works that he creates . . .” (2001d, 107). Accordingly, in Freud’s analysis Da Vinci’s painting The Virgin and Child with St. Anne becomes an expression of the artist’s childhood experiences as well as phantasies. Yet one could say that the image itself does not provide a mode of intelligence; like the unconscious, it “does not think.” 7See Crary (368); Laplanche and Pontalis (38-40); and Kittler (1990, 283-84).

50

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

the seemingly most insignificant. Freud imperatively approximates this technique to a mechanized one: the analyst “must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone” (2001b, 116). And following the functioning of self-recording machines common in laboratories of experimental physiology and psychology, ideas are to be written down “as they occur.” Thus, in its methodology, Freud’s epistemology follows the logic of technologies of reproduction emerging contemporaneously with psychoanalysis, especially the gramophone and the cinema. Freud’s self-analysis leading to the conception of a certain psychical reality plays on the accidental and the unintelligible as vehemently as the first stop-motion tricks in the Edison Company’s or George Méliès’ films. As Hugo Münsterberg puts it, in the silver screen, “[e]very dream becomes real, uncanny ghosts appear from nothing and disappear into nothing” (61), whereby, to follow Friedrich Kittler, “[s]ilent films implement with technological positivity what psychoanalysis can only conceive of: an unconscious that has no words and is not recognized by His Majesty the Ego” (1997, 92). However, the mechanical “purification” of the observer forms merely one part in the rebus of psychoanalytic epistemology, as the isomorphism between the analyst and modern media technology primarily touches upon certain methodical procedures. In addition, there is the question about the conception of the notion of a psychical reality, which the methodological appropriation of “nonsense” presupposes. In this respect, as we shall see, it is not the technological configuration but the “ideal” or virtual dimension of the moving image that acquires a significant yet unrecognized and even unconscious role in Freud’s thought. That is to say, despite Freud’s conscious effort to exorcize “plastic representation” from his epistemology, a differentiating dimension of the moving image manifests itself in a curiously silent manner in the basics of Freud’s metapsychological theory. More precisely, it becomes substantial in the elementary problem concerning how to perceive in full light a psychical reality that unlike a metaphysical entity retains its immanence and tangibility but cannot be perceived by the senses. The problem, Freud (2001e, 48-49, 536) brings out, concentrates on the notion of a specific psychical locality, a notion that derives from Gustav Fechner who in his “sublime simplicity” perceives how “the dream process is played out in a different psychic territory” (1985, 299). It should be noted that there is an inherent paradox in the very notion of psychical locality. If the psyche is connected with memory and, thus, at first glance at least, primarily conceived in temporal (dynamic) terms, it conflates with any notion of a specific location. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, during his whole career, Freud is occupied with a concrete model of his conception of the “mental

symploke¯

51

apparatus.” In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud brings forward the famous optical one: I propose simply to follow the suggestion that we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. (536-37)

In this passage, a notion of the image strangely recurs like a ghost from behind, when Freud is attempting to articulate one of the most fundamental aspects of his metapsychology. The psychical locality is explicated in terms of the image—yet not as an actual form but in terms of a virtual, dynamic image, an image which is in the process of its formation. However, this optical model confronts difficulties at the outset, as one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis is to explain the psyche in terms of functions (“systems”) and, in this respect, to make a fundamental distinction between consciousness and the unconscious, or memory. For Freud, the complexity of the psyche cannot be reduced to a camera obscura model regarding the mind composed of static pictures reflecting the outer world. Hence, it becomes problematic how to join these two systems into a single apparatus: “[T]here are obvious difficulties involved in supposing that one and the same system can accurately retain modifications of its elements and yet remain perpetually open to the reception of fresh occasions for modification” (2001e, 538). Or, as Joseph Breuer puts it: “The mirror of a reflecting telescope cannot at the same time be a photographic plate” (Freud 2001i, 188-89n1). That is to say, the problem concerns how to conceive of an image that is both open to new impressions and simultaneously retains its modifications on itself—an image that is both a perpetually open surface (the system perception-consciousness) and an unlimited “depth” of impressions (memory). This problem reappears in the final model Freud offers for the workings of the mental apparatus. In a short essay from 1925 entitled “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” Freud introduces a device that he sees as capable of fulfilling the two-fold function of fleeting perception and permanent retention, namely, a children’s drawing, or rather scratching, toy called the Mystic Writing-Pad (2001c, 227-32). To put it simply, the device consists of two parts that are detachable from each other from the lower end. First, the lower part is a slab of dark brown resin or wax. Secondly, the upper part is a transparent sheet which itself consists of two layers: the lower layer is made of translucent waxed

52

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

paper and the upper layer of a transparent piece of celluloid. The upper part with its two layers, according to Freud, conforms to the functioning of the system Pcpt. -Cs.: it receives stimuli (scratching) through the protective shield that diminishes the strength of incoming excitations. However, when the upper part of the device is detached from the lower part, all the scratching vanishes from the former. In this way, the system Pcpt. -Cs. remains transitory, in a state of flux. The wax slab, instead, retains permanent traces of each excitation. Hence, it conforms to the unconscious, which Freud likens to a “reservoir” of memory-traces. The unconscious becomes a space of retention in which “nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten” (2001e, 577). It should be noted, however, that what is inscribed on the wax slab does not stand in any relation of representation or resemblance to the excitations. Already in “The Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud proposes that memory is not a repetition of a content but of energetic differences, and what then counts is mnemic intervals (2001g, 300). It is through this notion that the problem of the psychical locality as a “self-modifying” image reappears: actual image-surfaces are retained in their virtual openness on the wax slab. More precisely, the slab retains differential relations, intervals, of images, ones that are dynamic or in the mode of dynamis, in other words, potential images which may or may not become actual. The status of this virtual, dynamic image—or what has earlier been called, following Deleuze, the crystal-image—in Freud’s thought is nevertheless paradoxical in a two-fold sense. First, the paradox concerns self-motion. In the “Note,” Freud summarizes, “If we imagine one hand writing upon the surface of the Mystic Writing-Pad while another periodically raises its covering-sheet from the wax slab, we shall have a concrete representation of the way in which I tried to picture the functioning of the perceptual apparatus of our mind” (2001c, 232). As regards this summarization, Jacques Derrida pertinently refers to how early Freud pictures the psyche as a machine that “in a moment would run of itself” (84, 114). In a crucial manner, however, the notion of selfmotion eventually generates a fundamental disparity between the Mystic Pad and the psyche, and thus challenges the concreteness of the model. Freud writes that “[t]here must come a point at which the analogy between an auxiliary apparatus of this kind and the organ which is its prototype will cease to apply. It is true, too, that, once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot ‘reproduce’ it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that” (2001c, 230). Derrida brings out that Freud’s characterization of the machine as inevitably “dead” is extremely Platonic: only the soul—a truly psychical trace—is able to reproduce and represent itself spontaneously. What is thus opposed is the tool (or toy) and thinking, surface-image and psychical depth. Secondly, regarding the psychical

symploke¯

53

depth as such the paradox concerns the fact that Freud conceives memory and the unconscious in spatial terms. Thereby, Freud’s conception implies a paradox concerning the infiniteness, unlimitedness of the hypothetical space of storage and of the set of potential inscriptions: what Freud’s model necessitates is a space which cannot actually be located in any particular place. Doane aptly suggests that Freud’s model requires “a virtual space—a space that is thinkable but not localizable” (42). The paradox amounts to the wax slab itself potentially becoming the infinite set of the world’s impressions. The two-fold paradox concerns the self-moving virtual image. What is more precisely the role of this paradox and, consequently, of the moving image in Freud’s thought? In general terms, to follow Deleuze’s argument in Logique du sens, a paradox is what functions as a genetic element of thought (83-100). The term “genetic” does not here refer to the neurobiology or physiology of the brain but to the singular elements according to which thinking generates and proceeds. The paradox operates by going simultaneously in two separate directions, as in Freud’s case the virtual moving image that points both to the concrete apparatuses and the abstract entity called psychical locality. As such, according to Deleuze, the paradox is an element which encompasses sense. The paradox is by no means simple nonsense (the absence of sense) but rather, to put it in Heideggerian terms, that which gives food for thought; and this food is sense. In Deleuze’s treatment, sense is what “insists” in propositions; it is what is expressible in a proposition (but not a proposition itself), and being the expressible element, sense allows the proposition to signify, to express something. Therefore, the paradox is one of the essential elements from which “having logos” generates. From this perspective, it can be argued that insofar as the moving image functions as the paradoxical element in Freud’s thought on the psychical locality, it is precisely the moving image which gives the notion its sense—makes the notion sensible. Freud’s use of the notion of the image to explicate psychical locality is not a metaphorical operation, but the image in fact functions at the very core of the genesis of the thought. Following this line of reasoning, beyond Freud’s dogmatic proposition “I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstractions is at all possible,” there is an element of “expressibility” or “thinkability” concerning what “our abstractions” refer to—and this element is the moving image. Thus, it is the moving image, emblematized in the white screen of Kador, that lets a mortal being called Freud “have logos” and create a set of singular propositions about the psychical locality. What is called genetic involves potentiality. It does not concern actual thoughts and their contents but potentialities to think. In fact, the white screen—and similarly the wax slab when considered as hypothetically empty in the absence of a single impression—evokes

54

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

Aristotle’s conception of potential intellect capable of thinking itself brought about in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics and commented on in De Anima. In the latter, Aristotle likens the potential intellect to a writing tablet on which nothing is written: [M]ind is potentially identical with the objects of thought but is actually nothing, until it thinks. What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet which bears no actual writing. (2000, 429b1-430a2).

In his essay “‘Pardes’: The Writing of Potentiality,” Agamben brings out that Aristotle’s empty writing tablet suggests the existence of intellect as pure potentiality, that is, potentiality not only to be or to do something but, more profoundly, potentiality not to be or not to do. Thought exists not only in an act of thinking. In addition, there is a pure potentiality of thought, like the writing tablet on which nothing is written, which “is a potentiality that is capable of not thinking, that is capable of not passing into actuality” (1999, 215). The virtual dimension of the moving image emblematized by the white screen is the undifferentiated “formless” that nevertheless enfolds forms and figures to be actualized. It is a pure potentiality to generate or not to generate forms, a purely potential memory and thought. The white screen enfolds such “virtual space,” which, to follow Agamben, includes its own potentiality to be “written” (or thought)—yet not to be “written” by something external to it but by itself: “Potentiality, which turns back on itself, is an absolute writing that no one writes: a potential to be written, which is written by its own potential not to be written, a tabula rasa that suffers its own receptivity and can therefore not not-write itself” (216). The white screen, thus, crystallizes a potential intellect which encircles not only the activity of thought but fundamental potentiality not to think, in other words, not to repeat the same but to create difference. This is how the moving image generates the epistemological transition that took place in Freud’s conception of the psychical locality circa 1900: by bringing forth the potentiality not to replicate what already has been thought but to create difference within thought itself.

The Figural The moving image—when not approached from the viewpoint of its techno-physiological materiality—is endowed with a certain capacity to generate and direct the formation of thought. This does not mean that the image would revert to subsisting as a self-showing mystical element

symploke¯

55

that would be the negative or transcendent presupposition of any possible act of thinking. Rather, the image becomes immanent potentiality to think, enfolding thinkability or sayability. It even appears that there is what could be called the “logos of the moving image” as potentiality of Freud’s actual thoughts about the psychical locality. In this regard, a pressing question arises as to this notion of sayability, that is, the image’s relation to language—at least as regards the way in which the relations and mutual frontiers between the word and the image become organized circa 1900. In Freud’s case, knowledge of the psychical locality is manifestly saturated with words, as the move to making sense of hysterical “babbling” already demonstrates. In this respect, however, psychoanalysis begins with an impotency to speak, or to understand written or spoken language, that is, the noise that aphasics experience instead of meaningful words. Freud’s 1891 study on aphasia can be seen to anticipate what was to become metapsychological knowledge of the workings of the psyche (Forrester 14-39). In the study, Freud brings forward that individual psychical unity is established at the level of language; it rests on the unity of the associative field of language. Aphasia, from this viewpoint, is a disorder of association. Freud’s view here is highly influenced by Hughlings Jackson’s theory of the nervous system as consisting of separate functional levels with different structures and levels of evolution. According to Jackson’s theory, aphasia does not concern specific localizations of speech centers but “the state of the nervous system” and its dissolution or regression to lower functional levels. It is partially under Jackson’s influence that Freud in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” differentiates between primary and secondary functions or processes of the nervous system—a distinction that would become the very basis for establishing the “locality” of the unconscious and the system Pcpt. –Cs. (2001g, 296-97, 326-27). In the “Project,” Freud also initiates the fundamental view that what eventually distinguishes between the two functions is speech, and more generally, linguistic formulation. Unconscious associations made up of flows of quantitative energy in the “Ψ-neurones” (primary process) acquire quality and thus become conscious when they are attached to “word-images,” later called “word-presentations” (Wortvorstellung) (2001g, 365, 372). Becoming conscious of an idea occurs when it is “cloaked” with words, since only they are able to give quality for flows of energy putting up psychical processes. Thought, primarily, takes place in words. Basing on this distinction, Freud conceives that word-presentations and visual images function on different levels. In his study on aphasia, Freud already approximates visual presentations to object associations, and thus to the “lower” functional level in Jacksonian terms (Forrester

56

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

27-29). This view holds throughout Freud’s work, as becomes evident in an argument in The Ego and the Id: “Thinking in pictures is . . . only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically” (21). Freud conceives that the unconscious, deprived of language (as well as thought), is composed of thing-presentations (Sachvorstellung or Dingvorstellung) which are defined as consisting “in the cathexis, if not of the direct memory-images of the thing, at least of remoter memory-traces derived from these” (2001f, 201). The thingpresentation is not analogous of a fact or thing but a reinvestment, “vitalization” of mnemic traces. Their relationship to word-presentations is approached in terms of regression which occurs both in dreaming as well as in neuroses: when the progress of an idea into consciousness along “the normal path,” that is through linguistic formulation, is hindered for some reason, the idea becomes transformed back to the sensory image from which it originates. Escaping the control of words, images revive and hallucinations occur. In a sense, then, within this constellation the image incorporates bare or simple repetition, whereas the word tends towards differentiation. The image, to paraphrase Freud’s formulation in a letter to Fliess from December 6, 1896, marks “the presence of ‘survivals,’” that is to say, memories that behave as though they were current events (hence, temporal recurrences) (2001g, 235). This amounts to a failure in the genesis of consciousness that Freud in the letter sketches as a chain of rearrangements and re-transcriptions. The genesis encompasses a gradual process in which “signs” bearing witness to perceptions are reproduced within at least three “registrations” (e.g., the unconscious and preconsciousness), and “thought-consciousness” finally arises from this “process of writing and rewriting,” as Daniel Heller-Roazen characterizes it (142). The image, the one that survives and recurs, marks a fissure in the chain of psychical “writing.” More precisely, it marks a break in what Freud calls “translation,” which—despite of all its ambiguities—refers to the frontiers at which different temporal periods (epochs of life) are organized, and thus to the process of forgetting. The image incorporates temporal recurrence due to which these frontiers become blurred. Yet this temporality also haunts language itself; in Freud’s conception of aphasia, to quote Heller-Roazen: It is that aphasia, contrary to the common conception, constitutes not a type of forgetfulness but exactly the reverse: an aggravated form of recollection, in which individuals, unwilling or unable to “re-arrange” or “re-transcribe” the “signs” of their perceptions, remember, so to speak, too much,

symploke¯

57

condemned to the perpetual recurrence of one utterance at the expense of all others. (145)

Thereby it is as if the image worked from within these fissures of language (or forgetting) as a disturbing force. This point already suggests that the demarcation between image and word is not simply that of qualitative opposition. Rather, it is to be specified what according to Freud words stand for. At least, they are not simple transcendental signifiers with a latent meaning to be unraveled. Foucault says that Freud considers linguistic signs bearing within themselves a malevolent element, since the sign itself is posterior to its interpretation: the sign conceals its own existence as interpretation in a myriad of associations (1994, 572). What could this malevolence derive from? In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports that in a dream he saw a sign reading either “You are requested to close the eyes” or “You are requested to close an eye” (2001e, 317-18). Discussing how the dream-work transposes logical connections implicit in dream-thoughts, Freud says that he usually writes the either–or relation in this case in the following form: the “You are requested to close

eye(s).” an

Remarkable in this short passage is that words become inseparable from the typographical space surrounding them. As Freud even notes, the socalled interpretation of the dream in question depends highly on which spatial conjunctions and disjunctions between linguistic signs are followed, since in dreams, as in paranoia and hysteria, words undergo a treatment of malformation and become ambiguous (2001e, 303, 318). Pertinently in this respect, Kittler argues that The Interpretation of Dreams in general “conducts the analysis of signs solely according to the place values of discrete elements” (1990, 274). Signs are nothing immaterial but become spatial units. The malevolence of signs implies first and foremost that they always tend to approximate to things as in the tricks performed by children who, as Freud puts it, “sometimes actually treat words as though they were objects . . .” (2001e, 303). In this respect, knowing the psyche does not rest on voice impregnated with signification but on the materiality of written signs which are, fundamentally, senseless—at least from the viewpoint of signification. As already noted, in the analytic situation, Freud, true to the heritage of experimental psychology and like an automatic selfrecording machine, maintains a “suspended attention” in order not to select but to register virtually everything and to cling to the accidental and the insignificant such as parapraxes, slips, and puns. Thereby, the

58

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

malevolence of signs amounts to a situation in which the so-called epistemological turn from looking to listening remains ambiguous. Kittler points out that the talking cure situation is far from listening in the sense of understanding and interpreting (1990, 273-91). Rather, it is an automated, mechanized channelling of discrete discursive elements. In this situation approximating to “a technical contest,” words themselves verge on the stochastic “white noise” from which they emerge (unarticulated images generated by the apparatus, the MysticPad, itself). Furthermore, what seems to be at issue in Freud is a conception of language based on a certain kind of figural sense. First of all, this is articulated in Freud’s theorization on hysterical conversion in which the body takes the place of verbal utterance, that is to say, “somatic expression” replaces linguistic ones and words become silent repetitions of gestures and bodily poses, as it were (2001i, 135-81). Words transform into flesh especially in hysterical conversion by symbolization, in which verbal formulation serves as an intermediary between affect and somatic symptom. The phrase “a slap in the face,” for example, allows a certain memory or a train of thought to become incorporated in a trigeminal neuralgia. What takes place here is the bodily acting out of the literal meaning of a figurative verbal expression. This bodily expression, however, should not be merely regarded as a result of an individual’s voluntary actions. Rather, the visual persists and recurs as the playground of language. For Freud, hysterical conversion reveals something of language itself, since “hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words in depicting its unusually strong innervations . . . . It may be that it does not take linguistic usage as its model at all, but that both hysteria and linguistic usage alike draw their material from a common source” (2001i, 181). Secondly, the “common source” becomes elucidated when Freud reports in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life about a patient telling a story from his childhood: He is sitting in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt, who is teaching him the letters of the alphabet. He is in difficulties over the difference between m and n, and he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from each other. His aunt points out to him that the m has a whole piece more than the n—the third stroke. (48)

When this apparently insignificant childhood scene undergoes the operations of Freud’s analytic machine, it is unraveled in a particular manner. The opposition of m and n appears as a “symbolic representation” of the opposition between the sexes:

symploke¯

59

For just as at that time he wanted to know the difference between m and n, so later he was anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls and would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a similar one— that the boy, too, has a whole piece more than the girl. (48)

In this passage Freud is not concerned with letters themselves, and his analysis has hardly anything to do with significance (Kittler 1990, 28182). Instead, Freud in fact operates by treating the letters as images of themselves, and what he is concerned with is a figural difference, a figural interval, between m and n. Freud’s analytic machine frames the letter as its own “differential” image: the letter m is not a discrete element in the alphabetical system but a figure with a third stroke distinct from the figure n with two strokes and the consequent absence of the extra piece. What then matters is the figural and imageable difference between the letters, which eventually provides Freud’s propositions about the scene with sense. This difference does not concern actual or virtual reference. In fact, Freud carves out from within language its most intimate materiality, which evinces a fundamental impotentiality to denote or to signify. Words become unable to take control over things, and it is as if things were functioning at the core of words themselves. That is to say, words become images of themselves, and it is this “imaging” or figural force that actually gives them their capacity to signify something. In this respect, Freud’s musing finds its artistic correlate in the work of Stéphane Mallarmé. In Mallarmé’s work, especially in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard from 1897, words eventually lose their “immaterial” affirmative and semantic function and become dependent on their spatial placement. The force of a white sheet of paper, so to speak, mobilizes, twists, and rhythms words so that they acquire sense primarily through their positioning in the typographic space. Words do not designate, or correspond to, things but, rather, they become utterly self-referring while circulating in the typographic space which is that of the poem. Thereby, Mallarmé writes in Variations sur un sujet, they are “transposed” (1945, 366). Transposition here means the opening up of a dimension of potentiality, that is to say, potential connections between linguistic elements. First of all, this leads to the fact that words unchain from their linear succession and acquire unresolved simultaneity. The page exhausts and ends up annihilating our conception of linear temporality, and unfolds a space, or rather a non-locality, of simultaneities, of a set of potential future, past and present connections between series. Mallarmé himself points out in the “Preface” to Un coup de dés that “[t]his copied distance, which mentally separates words or groups

60

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

of words from one another, has the literary advantage, if I may say so, of seeming to speed up and slow down the movement, of scanning it, and even of intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page . . .” (1994, 121). The second important point is that, while bringing out this crystalline “simultaneous vision” of potentialities, Mallarmé gets to conceive words as, at least virtually, mobile. The non-locality of the poem would thus be the moving image. Words become mobile images (of themselves), forming series between each other in acceleration or suspension. Paul Valéry notes this with respect to Un coup de dés when he argues that typographic space generates temporal forms and figures as if the cinematographic shot (qtd. in Mallarmé 1945, 1582). Indeed, circa 1900, it occurs that words are caught up in a kind of nonlinear temporality in the cinema. A scene from Fernard Legér’s Ballet méchanique (1924) presents linguistic signs as elements of the plastic, moving composition of the film’s “spectacle of things.” A text reading “On a volé un collier de perles de 5 millions” is fragmented and twisted around, whereas the main element in the scene is the sign “O” which is put in motion and multiplied, associating with a series of pearls in a necklace, with zeros in “5 millions” as well as with the vowel “o” governing the speech sound of the text. The repetition of these elements opens up multiple possible combinations between them. In addition to this sensational headline becoming like a movable thing itself, in Man Ray’s Emak-Bakia (1926), an electric advertisement text in motion, shining in the dark, is used as a material element supporting the motif of rotating luminous lines that characterizes the film. Here words, to paraphrase Mallarmé, are transposed into their “almost vibratory disappearance” (1945, 368). On the other hand, what also becomes transformed in these figures is the status of the image itself. Crucially, the image ceases to function as the silent repetition of things or as a mute gesture. What Mallarmé’s poem and Freud’s figural intervals alike relate to is in fact the moving image as enfolding a sphere of potentiality. What is disclosed is the transcendental field of the moving image, the image’s capacity to differentiate by generating sense. This suggests how circa 1900 the demarcation made during the birth of aesthetics, most notably in Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön (XIV), between arts based on succession and those based on simultaneity, word and image, logos and unconscious gesture, is radically challenged, as the crystal-image renders this separation obsolete by letting, as if in a single throw, the present (succession) and the past (simultaneity) converge in its composition. It even appears that propositional thought becomes confused with the image, as is exemplified by René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1926) in which, to follow Foucault’s analysis, linguistic formulation is no more

symploke¯

61

able to stop the so-called silent and unconscious repetition of things in the visible. Words cease to designate and affirm and, hence, to separate themselves from the image, whereas the image itself seems to acquire a certain capacity not only to reproduce or to imitate but also to differentiate. Foucault writes that there is “an absence of space, an erasure of ‘common ground’ between the signs of writing and the lines of the image” (1976, 12). This is due to the fact that, as Magritte puts it, “‘[a] word can take the place of an object in reality. An image can take the place of a word in a proposition’” (qtd. in Foucault 1976, 15). What occurs is that the image stops resembling and simply repeating, and the temporality of discourse permeates figurative space. The singular status of the image may be further characterized by considering the shifter “this” (ceci) in Magritte’s painting. Generally speaking, the function of the shifter can be understood as articulating a passage from signifying to showing, or from the langue to the parole, in a given instance of discourse (Agamben 1997, 47-60). Thus, the shifter points to the event of language’s taking place and its capacity to signify, to say something. It not merely refers to an object but, more fundamentally, to the event of language itself, “sayability,” which transcends that which is being said and signified. As such, according to Agamben, the shifter has a specific place in the history of metaphysics in opening up an ontological dimension—or what has been approached in terms of the transcendental field—in which being is given to thought (5859). From this viewpoint, the shifter “this” in Magritte’s painting marks a certain kind of confusion in our “dwelling” in language and the generation of the transcendental field of thought. First, the shifter does not refer to a sensible thing which is the picture of a pipe; rather, it annihilates the possibility of any simple affirmative function. Secondly, however, neither does it merely indicate the simple presence of language and unproblematically refer to the event of the proposition, “This is not a pipe.”8 Instead, the shifter in fact problematizes the status of the event of language in relation to the image, and thus questions the role of the image in the event of “having logos.” Instead of establishing identity or hierarchical separation between the image and the word, it points to a transcendental dimension of the image itself, that is, what can be conceptualized as “the logos of the moving image.” Magritte’s painting thus epitomizes an aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological change, which David Rodowick, following Foucault’s views, among others, approaches in terms of the figural (1-75). By definition, the figural is neither an actual figure nor even figurative. First, abolishing the self-identity of both the linguistic énoncé and the image, it marks a confusion between them. The figural is the force of this See Foucault (1976, 12-13).

8

62

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

confusion and, thus, its transgression. It is a potential matrix for the emergence of disjunctive relations between the image and the word. This relation does not follow a collateral logic according to which linguistic signs, through reference and differentiation, would encircle the unintelligible repetition of the image. Rather, the “mute repetition” of the visual itself becomes intelligible; it “speaks,” imagines, thinks— differentiates. On the other hand, it is to be noticed that not only the status of the word but also that of the image becomes problematic. It cannot be a question of a self-identical, unitary image but, instead, of a dynamic, moving image that acquires a certain non-linear and differential, crystalline, temporality. This kind of image is not visible itself, that is, actualizable in an image; it does not give itself to actual sensation. Rather, it is “anesthetic” in that it is only potentially given in the interstice between image and text, image and image, text and text. Rodowick argues that “the figural has exploded, fragmented, and accelerated regimes of visibility,” whence it unfolds a specific realm of the virtual (69). To recapitulate, Freud is evidently right in arguing that psychoanalytic “abstractions” are not figurable in any actual image; they do not let themselves be seen or presented. Nevertheless, Freud’s very conception of the psychical reality inaccessible to the senses supposes a certain sphere of intelligibility—one crystallized in a reconfiguration between the seeable and the sayable—that is established by the moving image which generates potentialities for the formation of novel ideas. Circa 1900 image and word are confounded in such a manner that thinking, the creation of concepts, becomes intimately implicated in the moving image. Concepts, however, cannot straightforwardly be deduced from the transcendental field that they presuppose.9 That is to say, psychoanalytic concepts have neither logical nor causal connection with the moving image; psychoanalytic concepts are not about the moving image, but their formation is partially directed by it. The moving image enfolds the potentiality to create those concepts. Thus, with the case history of Freud, we can see how circa 1900 the moving image generates logos, as it does not simply repeat but by means of crystalline temporality, directs and differentiates the orientations of thought by becoming the very capacity to think. UNIVERSITY OF TURKU

See Deleuze and Guattari (42-43).

9

symploke¯

63

References Abraham, Karl, and Sigmund Freud. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham: 1907–1925. Ed. Ernst Falzeder. Trans. Caroline Schwarzacher. London: Karnac, 2002. Agamben, Giorgio. Le langage et la mort: Un séminaire sur le lieu de la négativité. Trans. Marilène Raiola. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997. ___. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Aristotle. Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics. Trans. Harold Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. Vol. 1 of Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. ___. On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Trans. W. S. Hett. Vol. 8 of Aristotle in Twenty-Three Volumes. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone, 1988. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone, 1989. ___. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. ___. Logique du sens. Paris: Minuit, 1969. ___. “Immanence: A Life . . .” Trans. Nick Millett. Theory, Culture & Society 14.2 (1997): 3-7. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit, 1991. Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. Dir. Robert Wiene. Decla-Bioscop AG, 1919. Der Andere. Dir. Max Mack. Vitascope GmbH, 1913. Der Student von Prag. Dir. Paul Wegener. Deutsche Bioscop GmbH, 1912. Derrida, Jacques. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970. Forrester, John. Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis. London: Macmillan, 1980. Foucault, Michel. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Trans. Richard Howard. October 1 (1976): 6-21. ___. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Dits et écrits: 1954–1988. Ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 18. London: Vintage-Random, 2001a. ___. Case History of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 12. London: Vintage-Random, 2001b.

64

Pasi Väliaho

The White Screen circa 1900

___. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 1985. ___. The Ego and the Id and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 19. London: Vintage-Random, 2001c. ___. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 11. London: Vintage-Random, 2001d. ___. The Interpretation of Dreams. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vols. 4-5. London: Vintage-Random, 2001e. ___. On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 14. London: Vintage-Random, 2001f. ___. Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 1. London: Vintage-Random, 2001g. ___. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 6. London: Vintage-Random, 2001h. ___. Studies on Hysteria. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. Vol. 2. London: VintageRandom, 2001i. ___. Unser Hertz zeigt nach dem Süden: Reisebriefe 1895–1923. Ed. Christfried Tögel and Michael Molnar. Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 2003. Geheimnisse einer Seele. Dir. G. W. Pabst. Neumann-Filmproduktion, 1926. Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Unterwegs zur Sprahce. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2003. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language. New York: Zone, 2005. Janet, Jules. “L’Hystérie et l’hypnotisme d’après la théorie de la double personnalité.” Revue Scientifique 15 (1888): 616-23. Janet, Pierre. L’Automatisme psychologique: Essai de psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l’activité humaine. 10th ed. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1930. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. ___. “Romanticism—Psychoanalysis—Film.” Trans. Stefanie Harris. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays. Ed. John Johnston. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997. 85-100. Laplanche, Jean, and J. B. Pontalis. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. 4th ed. Paris: PUF, 2004. Le mystère des Roches de Kador. Dir. Léonce Perret. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont, 1912. Lundemo, Trond. “Technologies of Forgetting: Cinema and Recollection in Le Mystère des roches de Kador.” Film and Its Multiples: IX International Film Studies Conference. Ed. Anna Antonini. Udine: Forum, 2003. 283-90.

symploke¯

65

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems. Trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. ___. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings. Ed. Allan Langdale. New York: Routledge, 2002. Proust, Marcel. Time Regained. Trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin. Vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time. 6 vols. London: Vintage-Random, 2000. Rodowick, D. N. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Serres, Michel. Récits d’humanisme. Paris: Pommier, 2006.