Therapeutic Aesthetics

Performative Encounters in Moving Image Artworks

Maria Walsh

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350093140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Therapeutic Aesthetics focuses on moving image artworks as expressive of social psychopathological symptoms that arise in a climate of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, such as anxiety, depression, post- traumatic stress disorder and burnout. The book is not about engaging with art as a therapy to express personal traumas and symptoms but proposes that a selective range of contemporary moving image artworks performatively mimic the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a conflictual manner. Engaging with a range of philosophers and theorists, including Bernard Stiegler, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, Judith Butler, Félix Guattari, and Eva Illouz, Maria Walsh proposes that there is no cure, only provisional moments of reparation. To address this idea, she uses the concept of the pharmakon, the Greek term for drug which means both remedy and poison. Through this approach, she maintains the conflict between the curative and the harmful in relation to moving image artworks by artists such as Omer Fast, Liz Magic Laser, Leigh Ledare, Oriana Fox, Gillian Wearing and Rehana Zaman. As transitional spaces, these artworks can enable a toleration of anxiety and conflict that may offer another kind of aesthetic self-cultivation than the subjection to biopolitical governance in cognitive capitalism.

1

Introduction

This book is motivated by what might seem, at first, to be a counterintuitive idea: that is, that therapeutic aesthetics necessarily involves both toxicity and cure.¹ Usually, the therapeutic is thought of in relation to healing, its meaning being to treat medicinally, to cure. However, treatment, whether by drugs or alternative medicine, including the psy therapies, could be said to be inherently pharmacological. That is to say that the pharmacological, as I derive it from the ancient Greek term ‘pharmakon’, is a treatment that is both a poison and a remedy. While in common parlance every drug is considered to have side effects, my argument will err more on the side of the nonseparability of the beneficent and the harmful. Discussing a selective number of moving image artworks in the chapters that follow, I shall show how the philosophical ambivalence of the ‘pharmakon’ is echoed in their conflictual performances of art treatments.

Aesthetics too, in its association with beauty and sensory experience, is usually considered somewhat remedial, so it would seem counterintuitive to pair aesthetics with the ambivalence of the pharmacological.² However, aside from the sense that, in Western art practice since at least the 1960s, beauty in art appears outmoded,³ in a technologically mediated environment, the terms of aesthetic analysis have shifted to focus on ‘media dynamics, affect and perception’ as well as being ‘informed by and derived from practical, real-world encounters’ (Bennett, 2012: 2). The ‘real-world encounter’ that provides a model for the moving image artworks that I discuss in this book is a loosely articulated therapeutic scenario in which speaking is used as a treatment. This treatment, including narrative and performative modes of address, is not only inherently pharmacological, but, being embedded in a neoliberal socio-economic order that I refer to as cognitive capitalism, it is necessarily so. I will have much to say about this order in what follows, but, for now, I simply want to posit that the necessity of situating my moving image case studies in terms of a pharmacological aesthetics has to do with resisting the social proscribing of art as an enhancement of emotional well-being and mental health which is being promulgated by governmental and related institutions in neoliberal capitalism. A pharmacological aesthetics is, I believe, necessary to counter the harnessing of the arts and creativity as instruments for the therapeutic management of subjectivity.

For example in the UK, The Charter for Arts, Health and Wellbeing, produced by The National Alliance for Arts, Health & Wellbeing, which launched in 2012, reads: ‘The arts, creativity and the imagination are agents of wellness: they help keep the individual resilient, aid recovery and foster a flourishing society.’⁴ There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this ethos. However, it is not neutral. Not only are particular, I would say, conservative, forms of cultural and artistic activities promoted, but it is also a way of harnessing the arts to redeem a vanishing welfare state as well as being a means of getting them to justify their usefulness in a climate of reduced public funding. As sociologist Frank Furedi has identified, therapeutic culture, in foregrounding individual emotional needs as the site of social change, acts as a displacement of politics from the public realm and a marginalizing and eclipsing of ‘redistributive struggles’ (2004: 163). While the politics of ‘redistributive struggles’ is beyond the scope of my book, of relevance is Furedi’s critical account of how in 1990s Britain cultural institutions in general transform their role to become ‘centres for therapeutic engagement with excluded people’ (Furedi, 2004: 167). This is part of a shift in emphasis from the political management of social problems to the civic responsibility of esteeming the self.⁵ In the language of neoliberal capitalism, self-esteem transmogrifies into the promotion of a resilient individual who can survive whatever knocks and blows might be encountered in life without examining the structural reasons for the increase in particular psychopathologies in this climate. To be clear, I am not referring to overtly life-threatening illnesses, but disorders of a psychological nature such as depression, anxiety and exhaustion which, while they may lead to such illnesses, are also manifest as cultural phenomena.⁶ In case this statement sounds glib, it may be worth stating that I am no stranger to these symptoms, although, unlike the millennial generation, I have always been resistant to adopting them as personal diagnostic tools. This is not necessarily a moral choice, but due to the fact that my informative years were shaped by a socio-economic order that, although dominated by the toxicity of boom and bust investment, had not yet foreclosed on the future in terms of debt and speculative finance (Berardi, 2011; 2017). Part of the impetus for this book derives from the potential I have found in ‘using’ moving image to play with and transform, but not heal, such aforementioned symptoms.

The moving image artworks that steer this book are in no way a survey of contemporary artists’ works that address the therapeutic per se. Rather, my partly idiosyncratic selection enables me to put forward a particular narrative about the therapeutic as a site of cultural, not merely personal, diagnosis and resistance. In this, my case studies are part of a philosophical zeitgeist responding critically to the social, cultural and economic impasses of neoliberal cognitive capitalism. While each chapter mainly focuses on one central case study, this is not to foreground the intentionality of singular artists, but to use their works as tools of analysis that allow me to reflect on pharmacological aesthetics as both a diagnosis of and a micro-resistance to the psychopathologies that emerge within a context of cognitive capitalism. The moving image artworks I stage encounters with range from Omer Fast’s loose analogy to ‘the talking cure’ in his gallery film narratives derived from the symptomatology of veterans’ and drone pilots’ post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to Oriana Fox’s web series chat show which promotes rational emotive behavioural therapy (REBT) as a technique of self-improvement, albeit somewhat ironically. While these two diverse examples are linked, as are all my case studies, by how they variously perform what sociologist Eva Illouz calls a ‘therapeutic emotional style’ (2008: 15), they also signpost the development of my book’s argument from a first part that takes a more overtly diagnostic, critical stance towards the toxic, without denying its remedial potential, to a second half in which the curative dimension of the pharmacological takes the upper hand without denying its toxicity.

Not art therapy

Before going any further, it is important to note that the concept of therapeutic aesthetics as I explore it here is not art therapy and does not address the discipline of art therapy.⁷ Art therapy usually involves the analysis of participants’ art production in terms of how it might be a portal to the expression of repressed traumas or difficult ideas and how drawing out – in both senses of the word – these traumas enables participants to move forward in their lives. This idea of art therapy is linked to the public reception of certain artists, who are deemed to be, and esteemed for, acting out their traumas and using their art as a means of publicly working through them. In the field of contemporary art, one might think of Tracey Emin, Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama who all admit to using their work in this way. Interestingly, these are all women artists, though male artists such as Mike Kelley, Robert Gober and Michael Landy could equally be said to publicly work through traumatic experience. However, their ‘acting out’ is classed as social critique, whereas the aforementioned female artists’ works are considered as a direct expression of the personal. This discrepancy highlights the fact that the therapeutic, while popular with audiences, is frowned upon in serious art discourse. From the perspective of the latter, the therapeutic is a feminized and uncritical mode of accounting for personal experience in narratives that structurally oscillate between damage and redemption. For example, in the 1990s, US art historian and critic Hal Foster criticized contemporary art that he considered aped the psychologistic compulsion of therapy culture to speak one’s trauma on talk shows and in memoirs (Foster, 1996a: 123–4). His view was that rather than succumbing to the presence-to-self exhorted by such media forms, art’s purview revolves around the unrepresentability of trauma, an aesthetic mode that questions conflating identity and/as traumatic experience. And while my goal in this book is not simply to recuperate the therapeutic as an aesthetic mode of criticality, key to my argument is that the performative strategies used in my artists’ moving image case studies question the mythemes of aspirational selfhood promulgated in neoliberal cognitive capitalism.

Cognitive capitalism

The term ‘cognitive capitalism’ is defined by French economist Yann Moulier Boutang as a third form of capitalism – the first two being the mercantile and the industrial – which is founded on ‘the accumulation of immaterial capital, the dissemination of knowledge and the driving role of the knowledge economy’ (2011: 50). Cognitive capitalism is ‘part of a range of new terms which have also tried to question the uncritical identification of the economy with the capitalist economy tout court (such as communicative capitalism, semioinfocapitalism, biocapitalism, neoliberal capitalism and such likes)’ (Terranova in Neidich, 2013: 47).⁸ Terranova takes issue with the term ‘cognitive’ for not emphasizing the centrality of the affective and the pre-cognitive to the operations of contemporary capitalism and its extraction of surplus value from these immaterial phenomena. However, for me, this is implied by the term given the insistence in contemporary neuroscientific accounts of cognition on automatic and unconscious processing.⁹ It could be said that all the terms Terranova lists are united in being various attempts to describe a contemporary capitalist paradigm in which surplus value is extracted from intellectual, immaterial and relational forms of living labour rather than simply from mechanized industrial production. Part of this expansion of the areas of life available for the extraction of surplus value extends to the aesthetic freedom that characterized art as a realm separate from labour in modernist discourse. However, this has not been the case for quite some time.

As Hal Foster put it in 1983, the notion of a general aesthetic realm as a realm separated from the world that acted as ‘a critique of the world as it is’ (xv) has itself become absorbed and instrumentalized by that very world in which global wars and exploitative conditions are exacerbated. Foster posed the term ‘anti-aesthetic’ to posit the necessity for a strategy of interference and practice of resistance in the face of such a world (1983: xvi). And rather than this being a definitive position, Foster’s proposition of the anti-aesthetic ‘signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic (e.g. feminist art) or rooted in a vernacular – that is, to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm’ (Foster, 1983: xv). Such a privileged aesthetic realm is further dismantled by the proximity of contemporary forms of art production, its affective and intellectual labour, to other forms of knowledge production such as ‘the global mass of living labor-including activities performed in leisure time such as posting comments, photographs and videos to social networking platforms’ (Terranova, 2013: 49). The aesthetics of cognitive capitalism could be said to paradoxically achieve the avant-garde desire to unite art and life, but rather than this being a liberation from labour, it entails an increased subjugation to it. As Terranova goes on to describe:

From advertising and marketing to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, from media production to the arts, from care of the body and the self (care of children, the elderly, the sick, beauty and fitness) to the aesthetic production of everyday life (everything pertaining to the home, fashion and style), ultimately, contemporary capitalism implies a real subsumption of the whole of life stretching from the biological life of the species to the spiritual life of publics, from bios to noos, from organic to inorganic life. (2013: 50)

If one accepts this categorization of contemporary life under capitalism, it is not a great stretch of the imagination to consider the numerous psychopathologies incessantly discussed in contemporary media as being connected to this subsumption. I shall have cause to repeat them many times in this book, but Terranova lists them as follows: ‘Attention deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, panic, burn-out syndrome, and even new quasi-pathologies such as Internet addiction expose a kind of excess of the life of the psyche with relation to the imperatives of productivity’ (2013: 51). Terranova’s list tallies with those of other theorists and philosophers whose work will be drawn on in future chapters – Bernard Stiegler, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Félix Guattari, Steven Shaviro and Jonathan Beller, amongst others. While this is a list of male heavyweights, I would insist from the outset that my approach is feminist in that I use a questioning method that does not fully subscribe to their use of ‘“bulldozer” concepts’ (Illouz, 2008: 4) such as neoliberal capitalism, biopolitics and semiocapitalism. Although I shall continuously revert to the term cognitive capitalism, I intend it to function as a shorthand reference to a capitalist context that is characterized by the extraction of surplus value from psychological life and in which art functions as another form of immaterial labour, both conditions generating psychopathological symptoms that provide rich material for artists’ moving image works.

In conjunction with particular case studies that have informed my thinking of therapeutic aesthetics as pharmacological and as a micro-resistance within neoliberal cognitive capitalism, the philosophical springboard for my argument is Stiegler’s engagement with psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (2013a). While my chapters will move away from Stiegler’s critique of what he calls consumerist capitalism to foreground artworks as themselves theoretical objects and to focus more on an expanded sense of Winnicott’s concept of transitional space, I begin by adopting Stiegler’s pharmacological critique whereby he updates Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the pharmakon in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (1981).¹⁰

The pharmakon

The etymology of the Greek word ‘pharmakon’ as simultaneously referring to both remedy and poison may be familiar to Western academic audiences through its resuscitation in Derrida’s essay. In ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, Derrida engages with the Phaedrus in which Plato considers the technology of writing as a poison that contaminates the self-presence or authenticity of speech as the truth of inner experience. In Derrida’s deconstructionist reading of Phaedrus, he shows, however, that speech is always dependent on an (technological) exteriority that informs the experience of the inside. The outside and the inside are always in a dynamic, enfolding relation to one another rather than a hierarchical or separable one. Writing is both the remedy to memory and the poisoning of memory, its pharmacology being ‘the passage among opposing values’ (Derrida, 1981: 98). Derrida refers to Thamus in the Phaedrus pointing out that ‘the pharmakon of writing is good for hypomnesis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mneme (living, knowing memory)’ (91). While this condemns it as of little worth in Thamus’ eyes, Derrida shows that the medicinal cure of speaking is itself a treatment ‘based on recipes learned by heart’ (72). And, not only that, but the art of speaking was considered an even better pharmakon than writing by the rhetoricians who used it to sway audiences rather than to testify to the truth of inner experience. As Elizabeth Wilson in her critique of antidepressants writes: ‘Derrida’s analysis of the pharmakon brings our attention to how this word always signifies in more than one direction: it can never mean just “remedy” without also meaning “poison” and “philter”. […] it is not possible to … heal’ (2015: 143). Although I shall not be looking at pharmaceuticals per se, Wilson’s conclusion that antidepressants are ‘one mode of remedy-poison in a system of depressing differences, alliances, partialities, and disjunctions’ (145–6) echoes my counterintuitive notion that the therapeutic aesthetics enacted in and by my artists’ moving image case studies are conflictual and ambivalent, both toxic and curative in one and the same measure.¹¹ To develop my argument, I append the concept of performativity, which I would say is inherently pharmacological, to therapeutic aesthetics.

Performativity

The concept of performativity is best known in Western academic circles in its derivation from feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s 1990s reworking of linguist J.L. Austin’s speech acts in conjunction with Derrida’s insistence on the instability of the sign.¹² Although Austin would later say that all speech acts are performative to one degree or another, the generally held view of performativity is based on his initial categorization of speech into constative and performative acts, the former tending to describe and make statements that can be validated as being true or false, while the latter to enact a situation, thereby instituting a change of state in a ritualistic, social and/or legal context. For example, the speech act ‘I sentence you to three years in prison’ executes its action at the same time as the utterance. The impetus of Butler’s reformulation of Austin’s performative speech acts was to suggest that identity norms are consolidated by the repetitive iteration of learned behaviours and rituals. Rather than being essential to the subject, identity is ‘performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results’ (Butler, 1990: 25). Thereby, performativity exposes ‘the instability and incompleteness of subject-formation’ (Butler, 1993: 226).

The version of performativity I shall deploy in this book refers to both Butler’s emphasis on language and its more commonsensical meaning as theatrical performance. In this, I follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. While acknowledging Butler’s distinction between performativity and performance, i.e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Setting the scene – two supplementary vignettes
• 3 The imbrication of poison and cure in Harun Farocki
• 4 Homeopathic mimicry in Omer Fast’s war trilogy
• 5 Melanie Gilligan’s signifying semiologies and the micro-resistance of collective subjectivity
• 6 Pharmacological reparation in Liz Magic Laser’s Primal Speech
• 7 Leigh Ledare’s pharmacological aesthetics of group analysis
• 8 Aesthetic modes of performative truth-telling in The O Show and Self Made
• 9 The transitional pleasures of emotional labour in Lucy Beech’s and Rehana Zaman’s videos
• 10 Conclusion: Toxicity and self-care – two poles of pharmacological aesthetics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint