FALLING INTO THE VOID

José Jiménez

 

         In today's world, each and every day, we all have the feeling that life is running at a frenzied and often chaotic pace. We feel overwhelmed, dragged along by a flow of events that we are not able to fully control, events that produce an unusual heightening of the sensation of vertigo, taking it beyond its original physiological meaning as a disorder with associated symptoms including dizzy spells, anxiety and loss of balance. Yet –to come quickly to the point from the very outset– for human beings there is something constitutive in this non-physiological by-product of vertigo, in its generalization as an experience of falling, which relates to the framework of desire, with the latter's never fully achievable quality.

         Patrick Mimran has conceived a powerful visual approach, based on video and large scale photographs, and centred on vertigo's heightened energy. In Mimran's pieces the experience of losing control, of free falling, slips before our eyes. His works act as a kind of echo of the unceasing flow of images that accompany us and wedge their way into our lives, whether we like it or not, the most powerful centres of which are to be found in sex and consumerism. The thread of desire creates a nexus of union in the sketchy circularity that exists between these two centres. As well as an authoritarian field of control and interference, where the various facets of power can function, which tends to repress the transgressive aspects of desire, its configuration as vertigo, reducing it to a level of banality and submissiveness.

         Through his images Mimran relates the experience of vertigo to the idea of physical attraction between the sexes, the man-woman duality. In short, to sex and its forbidden elements at the core of society. But vertigo is depicted in them too, alluding to the role that is played by money as a form of seduction. Or suggesting the self-satisfied mentality of the middle classes, hypnotized by the mirror of television and other media, with an allegorical image of cows grazing peacefully in a field.

         But if one is looking for an underlying quality to Mimran's approach, it is a sense of falling, of slipping away: the falling of the body during sex, uncontrollable falling of the psyche into the void. Vertigo. In a multicoloured universe, made up of artificial hues, both protective and insulating: pills, red and rose-coloured condoms, the plastic syringe-rocket full of bodies. And of the fleeting noises and shapes that mark the urgent incitement of our times to speed and consumerism. Which are arranged, almost unnoticeably, as a backdrop to our perception, and we hardly see and hear anymore having heard and seen so much: traffic, sirens, billboards, advertising, communications... Vertigo.

         The unquenchable quality of desire, its vastness in comparison to the smallness of the individual, who is, nevertheless, continually urged on by its spurs, is reflected in the contrast of the small figures that fall without interruption, signs in the image of vertigo that trap us and carry us away. However, these small figures, toys that take us back to the games of our childhood, express, perhaps, desire's last stand in a mass society: its trivially fetishistic nature, its unavoidable acquiescence to unmitigated, mass-produced repetition.

         Vertigo, vertigo: a compelling impulse. Or an urge. Let's see. Medical literature includes vertigo among the pathologies of balance. But, almost immediately, things start to complicate. For it is also categorized as a subjective symptom, one which the patient describes in several different ways. Such as, for example, a sensation of unsteadiness when walking, a sensation of floating in the air, a sensation of lightheadedness... Subjective: referring to the individual, judged by him, in short: open to interpretation. Interpretation which flows in the terms of the sensations of vertigo: unsteadiness, floating, lightheadedness.

         Let's finish the picture: because of the proximity, in the human brain, of the centres of balance and the cardiopneumogastroenteric nerve centre, symptoms of vertigo or dizziness may be experienced together with other symptoms originating in the latter centre or nucleus, such as a sensation of suffocation, palpitations or heart arrhythmia, nausea, vomiting or diarrhaea. For the feeling of vertigo to be a conscious one, the centre of balance depends on its interrelation with the upper cortical centres or the cerebral cortex. To be even more precise: the cerebral zone responsible for making dizziness conscious corresponds specifically to the rear upper part of the temporal lobe.

         Though no one dies of vertigo or dizziness, from a medical point of view it is considered an illness, which handicaps the person who suffers it and makes it impossible for them to lead a normal life. The fact is that though no one dies of vertigo or dizziness, its impact is that of a major illness, provoking a sensation of imminent death.

         Common sense distinguishes, however, the difference between dizziness and vertigo, especially when the dizziness is minor and transitory. On the whole vertigo is attributed a much more lasting character. But in any case, it is here, in the anatomical structure of the human brain, that we find an explanation for what, as I have suggested, I consider the most important thing about the idea of vertigo: its link with the sensation of falling. A sensation which, at the same time, is experienced as a premonition of death. Vertigo: we fall, we die.

         A trigger image in Patrick Mimran's piece takes us by video on a vertiginous descent, rapidly free falling, towards a V shaped wooden platform on which a naked woman, who appears to be quietly sunbathing, reclines. The eye, as the camera, slides irrepressibly in the excess, penetrating the body of desire that it would like to possess with its gaze. Vertigo of sight: peeping Toms, voyeurs, show the desire to have everything the eye can behold, possess through the eye, but from a sheltered spot, concealing themselves, trying to watch without being seen. The voyeur is a busybody who fantasizes being able to see everything using the eye like a hole, like a place to hide. But it is in the holes, in the gaps, that we fall. Vertigo of sight.

         That excess is shifted and transformed by the fetishization of the female body, by confrontational images of masculinity and femininity: dialectics, opposition, war of the sexes: falling into the body of the other. And it is similarly transformed by another form of fetishization, in the shape of dolls, signs of regressive possessiveness, charged with desire, which fall like rain, or slip vertiginously towards the sucking mouth of the female sex. Man's ancestral fear of the supposed man-eating nature of women, ancestral sexism omnipresent in the sexual habits of this allegedly liberal society, over burdened with prejudice and half-concealed authoritarian norms.

         Viewing the images in Patrick Mimran's pieces, one feels dialectically transported to the experience of a total screen, to the staging of both human life and social relationships as spectacle. Everything is image (media), everything is consumerism. His conceptual references lead not only to a Guy Debord's critique of the Society of the Spectacle, but also to the experience of mass societies today, those ones in which a fully socially integrated consumerism is carried out, before a totalitarian backdrop, in a framework of feigned liberty. Feigned, because the actual material aspects for liberty to be fully operative are only really within the reach of a privileged few.

         The main thing is that by means of his visual exploration of vertigo, the perfectly defined, faultlessly crafted way that his pieces capture current media language, with its alienating and persuasive associations, Patrick Mimran leads us to ponder one of the really key questions about which, caught in the cogs of our daily routine, we seldom think. I am referring to the channeling of desire as a force for social integration, to its exploitation in the process of intensifying demand and consumerism. A utilitarian, repressive channeling blocking the flow of human liberty, that goes far beyond the necessary limits that must be applied to the realization of desire in terms of the individual so that life in society can be viable.

         From a psychoanalytical point of view, Jacques Lacan (1966, 98) insisted on the role played by desire as a primordial drive towards socialization, at the end of the process of building the self, what he termed the mirror stage, when “by identification of the imago in one's peers and in the drama of primordial envy(...) the dialectic which from that point forth links the self to socially complex situations.”

         Identification in the image of the self with other selves involves taking a step to what we call social order, or culture in the anthropological sense. For this reason, Lacan repeatedly states in his writing that “man's desire is desire for the Other”, cautioning us about the need to use a capital letter for “Other”. For this term refers to “the province of the displacement of the word (the other stage, eine andere Schauplatz, which Freud mentions in his Interpretation of Dreams)” (Lacan, 1966, 628), to the “place where the self is constructed speaking to that which listens, where what one says is already the reply and the other resolves to listen regardless of whether the former has or has not spoken” (Lacan, 1966, 431). That is why, to be satisfied, though, as we will see, never completely so, desire must be recognized in the domain of symbol and imagery (cfr. Lacan, 1966, 279), which is what that powerful Freudian expression the other stage is alluding to.

         It is this linguistic dimension: symbolic and imagistic, that means human desire can never be fully satisfied. As Lacan says (1966, 627), “desire is what becomes manifest in the interval that deepens the question nearer to itself, while the individual arranges its chain of meaning, it sheds light on his deficiency of being by calling to receive his counterpart the Other, when the Other, place of word, is also the place of this deficiency.” Desire, being located at a linguistic level: symbolic and imagistic, can never be embodied in beings or in specific objects, “because the being of language is the non-being of objects”.

         Desire is the experience of deficiency, and hence unquenchable, and at the same time, “indestructible” (Lacan, 1966, 518). It produces, likewise according to Lacan (1966, 629), above and beyond its demand and its purpose, pruning the useless branches from the individual's tree of life. But it also explores, goes deeper, in its nearness, because, “while the unconditional demand of presence and of absence evokes this deficiency of being under the three figures of nothingness that constitute the basic demand for love, for hate –which will deny the being of the other– and for the indescribable, for what has been overlooked in its petition”.

         Let's say it more clearly and definitively: desire does not refer to anything real, but through its persistent and unquenchable demand, which flows outwards: beyond, and sinks into the depths, into the innermost: nearer, it evokes these three figures of nothingness: love, hate and the indescribable, which, interweaving and combining together in a variety of ways, form the axis of the dramatic plot which is acted out on the other stage. That region where human beings vertiginously place and displace the demands of the Other.

         Faced with this continuously recreated experience of nothingness, with this interminable, unlimited, symbolic and imagistic universe, which is superimposed upon and denies the natural one, how could one not feel vertigo, not undergo the inevitable feeling of free-falling, not experience the premonition of death? Looking beyond the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, it is Georges Bataille (1943, 87) perhaps, who has best expressed the issue: “The negation of nature carried out by man –elevating himself over a nothingness of his own handiwork– leads directly to vertigo, to falling through the void of the sky.”

         We excitedly experience the matter caught by thought during its exploration of the inner experience as eroticism. In fact, as can be seen from the broad significance of the word knowledge, wisdom and love are branches of the same healthy tree, the traces of which we pursue under the name of desire.

         With Bataille, erotic excitement is presented as literature. His novels, for many years misleadingly associated with the mediocre formula of pornography, as abominable to the conservative mind as Sade's texts, are an exhaustive linguistic inventory of this imagistic universe which transmutes basic animal sexuality into eroticism. In one of these novels, the vertigo of falling is transformed into a very colourful image, into a metaphor of reversal, into a new concept of the blue of noon.

         The voice of the book's narrator, whose name, Troppman, is in itself allegorical: the excessive man, situates us at the point of a sudden upsurge –for a couple who have lost the vigour of mutual excitement– in a kind of explosion of desire: “In a bend in the path a void opened up beneath us. Strangely, that void was no more limited, there by our feet, than the starry sky above our heads” (Bataille, 1936, 179). Excitement gives way to the passionate bonding of bodies to the earth, and to the experience of reversal, falling upwards, rising up to the sky: “Farther down there was a piece of rock that rose out above the void. And if that slipping had not stopped in a flash, we would have fallen into the night, and I could truly have believed, amazed, that we were falling through the void of the sky” (Bataille, 1936, 181).

         Obviously, Bataille plays, in his literary texts, with a whole range of allusions that are developed in his philosophical writings. With the idea, for example, at the core of what he coined the inner experience, which proposes that we come into existence as discontinuous beings, the self being formed later on, and finally return to a continuity of being when death occurs. Quite clearly this idea relates to Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical precepts.

         But, taking this issue as his point of departure, Bataille also plays with the idea of the premonition of death, something which is experienced during intense moments of eroticism, explaining, for example, the association of pleasure and pain in erotic gratification, and which leads us to Sade and Masoch, to whom Patrick Mimran alludes in his works. In the case of the Marquis de Sade, by allowing us a fragmentary glimpse of the printed word in the video images and photographs, Mimran transforms the subject once again into a slippery surface. The barely discernible glimpse of a work that converts desire into a literary body, grammar of excess, fantasy of limitless desire.

         As Bataille himself has pointed out, one of the expressions used in French to refer to the orgasm is la petite mort, the little death. That moment when self-control and self-awareness are lost, when the individual is depersonalized, not in an idealistic fusion with the other, but rather in waves of pleasure that bring about a fusion with the Other: the fragmentary and transitory experience of desire fulfilled, but which almost immediately returns to a deficiency of reality. Premonition of death: vertigo. Falling into the bottomless pool of desire.

         At the same time, the presence of vertigo, of the premonition of death, in eroticism is connected to a profound aspect which distinguishes it from a clear, natural sexuality. An aspect which has led to psychoanalytic literature's insistence upon, when translating Freud, using the term urge, from the German Trieb, to refer specifically to those human instincts, to the ones that are formed or constituted by means of words and the symbolic world of culture, rather than mere instincts, more or less fixed, strictly biological or ethological, norms of behaviour, that relate to the animal world. This “basic animal” which, nevertheless, dwells in all of us, as Friedrich Nietzsche was fond of reminding us, and which, like it or not, human beings cannot avoid, let's say, coming back to. Or regressing. Or falling. Vertigo.

         With Bataille, the question relates to his conception of eroticism as the outcome of a dialectic in which two classes participate and confront each other: one is transgression, which effectively explains why human beings are able to eroticize with anything: because, as we have seen, anything is nothing, deficiency of reality, and prohibition (interdict) is imposed by the introduction of a limit, of a structure of reference, which confers transgression, the will for breaking it, a strong attraction and motivation.

         What this dialectic basically contains is an animal-cultural circularity, a symbolic physical-world fundament, which characterizes the human dimension and is particularly visible in eroticism: “In the stage of prohibitions, man became separated from animals. He attempted to evade the excessive game of death and of reproduction (of violence), which animals are exposed to unprotected. But, in the secondary stage of transgression, he looked to animals once more. He saw in animals things that avoided the rules of prohibition, that had remained open to the violence (excess), that governs the world of death and reproduction.” (Bataille, 1957, 116-117).

         Through transgression, human beings feel the fascination for violence that is so evident in eroticism, in a way that has nothing to do with animal sexuality. In human life, “sexual violence opens up a wound. A wound that seldom heals by itself: it must be healed” (Bataille, 1957, 146). This matter brings us to the truth revealed in extreme forms of eroticism, which Bataille is at pains to avoid characterizing, in traditionally negative terms, as perversions or deviations. Which explains, for example, why what Sade proposed “usually horrifies the same people who seek to admire it”, that is: “that the act of love, taken to the limit is an act of death” (Bataille, 1957, 63). And, in another sense, it is also connected to the human acceptance of sacrifice, which reflects this logic of excess common to certain forms of religiosity and eroticism. The sacrifice embraces vertigo, the fall into nothingness: “The sacrifice is madness, the rejection of all knowledge, the fall into the void and nothingness, yet nothing is revealed either during the fall or in the void, because the revelation of the void is simply a vehicle to fall even farther into absence” (Bataille, 1943, 60-61).

         Vertigo, the feeling of falling into nothingness, is inevitable because, ultimately, it invariably subsists in the notion of the abyss underlying eroticism. This is the premise of The Tears of Eros, a study which Bataille set aside to analyzing the associations between pain, sacrifice and eroticism, and which are characterized by a first step, “one of opening one's mind to the identity of the ‘little death' and of permanent death: from voluptuosity and unrestraint to limitless horror” (Bataille, 1961, 37).

         Despite the fact that one can perceive similarities between the two metapsychological urges: Eros and Thanatos, which were incorporated into psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud in 1921, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and can also be found, if we look further back in time, in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. But I believe it is in Bataille's work that we find certain nuances to help us better understand the feeling of vertigo caused by eroticism. Whereas for Freud the death urge is closely tied up with the notion of a zero principle or Nirvana, taking the shortest route back to the absence of excitement. For Bataille (1957, 201), the prohibition-transgression does indeed entail that “the ultimate meaning of eroticism is in death”. Yet he also mentions something that can only seem contradictory on the surface, that eroticism is “the endorsement of life even in death” (Bataille, 1957a, 690).

         And this is the case because, though it has not yet happened, though the farthest edge of death can be glimpsed darkly, eroticism cheats, seeking to assert itself as a vital and expansive force: “To all appearances the vicissitudes of eroticism are distanced from its essence, which links it to the nostalgia for a lost continuity. Human life can only go on by trembling –cheating– the movement that drags towards death” (Bataille, 1957, 203-204).

         The trembling, the dragging and shaking, is ordained by the vertigo principle, the sensation of unavoidable falling into the void, into the nothingness of existence, that we encounter in eroticism. A sensation which ultimately springs from the dark corner of consciousness –for the most part never becoming completely conscious– to experience, through erotic voluptuousness, the farthest edge of life, that is death, inevitable death.

 

 

 

Bibliographic references

 

- Georges Bataille (1936) : Blue of Noon, Eng. tr. by Harry Matthews; Marion Boyars, London, 1979.

- Georges Bataille (1943) : Inner Experience, Eng. tr. by Leslie A. Boldt; State University of New York Press, 1988.

- Georges Bataille (1957) : Eroticism, J. Calder, London, 1962.

- Georges Bataille (1957a) : "L'érotisme et la fascination de la mort", text taken from the conference and subsequent discussion which took place in Paris on 12 February 1957, published in Oeuvres Completes, Vol. X; Gallimard, Paris, 1987, pp. 690-695.

- Georges Bataille (1961) : The Tears of Eros, Eng. tr. by Peter Connor; City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A, 1989.

- Jacques Lacan (1966): Écrits; Seuil, Paris.