Hiroshima After Iraq

by Deutsche, Rosalyn

• ISBN13: 9780231152785
• ISBN10: 0231152787
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Many on the left lament what appears to be an apathy or amnesia toward recent acts of war. Particularly during the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, opposition to war seemed to lack the heat and potency of the 1960s and 1970s, giving the impression that passionate dissent was all but dead. Through an analysis of three politically-engaged works of art, Rosalyn Deutsche efficiently debunks this theory, confirming the ability of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war.Deutsche selects three videos centered on the deployment of the atomic bomb. Krzysztof Wodiczko's Hiroshima Projection(1999) was made after the first Gulf War. Silvia Kolbowski's After Hiroshima mon amour(2005-2008) and Leslie Thornton's Let Me Count the Ways(2004-2008) followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Each confronts the ethical task of addressing historical disaster, and each explores the intersection of past and present war. These artworks contribute deeply to the discourse of war resistance. They also illuminate the complex dynamics of viewing and interpretation. Deutsche employs feminist and psychoanalytic techniques in her study, questioning both the role of totalizing images in the production of warlike subjects and the fantasies that perpetuate, especially among the left, traditional notions of political dissent. Her study ultimately reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and a dominant discourse that denies the personal dimensions of war.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Silvia Kolbowski	p. 9
Leslie Thornton	p. 33
Krzysztof Wodiczko	p. 55
Notes	p. 71
Bibliography	p. 77
Index	p. 83
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Introduction

Maurice Blanchot said that political impatience makes criticism warlike. Driven by the urgency of human-inflicted disasters, we want to proceed straight to the goal of social transformation, and so, wrote Blanchot, the indirection of the poetic -- and, we might add, the artistic -- displeases us. It should not be surprising, then, that the pressing events of the past eight years—war, rendition, torture—have produced many examples of impatient criticism. Two years ago, for instance, the journal October sent a questionnaire to a group of art world intellectuals, soliciting opinions on artistic opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. October 's attempt to open up a conversation about art and war was welcome, but its survey suffered from the fallacy of the loaded question. It asked: "What, if anything, demotivates the current generation of academics and artists from assuming positions of public critique and opposition against the barbarous acts committed by the government of the United States against a foreign country?" And, after noting that today "antiwar opposition seems most visible on the Internet" and asking if the "electronic-technological public sphere" measures up to the public protests of the Vietnam era, another question inquired whether this condition implies a "fundamental transformation of the sense of a political public subject," a transformation that, in the context of the journal's comparison between the present and what it portrayed as an earlier golden age of protest, could only be viewed as a degeneration from activism to quietism. What emerged was a thinly disguised decline-and-fall jeremiad about opposition to war in which current antiwar activity appeared in an unfavorable light by contrast with that of the 1960s and seventies, when, as the editors put it, "agitprop cultural activities were organized through word of mouth, flyers, and planning meetings, and demonstrations were staged in the streets, in museums, and in a variety of print media."

October published forty-two responses to its questionnaire in its Winter 2008 issue. The editors' introduction to this issue brought into the open what had remained implicit in the original questions, stating that addressees of the questionnaire had been asked to evaluate "the seeming absence of visible opposition within the milieu of cultural producers working in the sphere of contemporary visual culture." And although the editors claimed that the responses informed them of diverse forms of opposition to the war, they nonetheless continued to assert that "the role of academics, intellectuals, and artists in the cultural public sphere has been reduced to anesthesia and amnesia."

October 's impatience with current antiwar activity in art -- and its paternal demand that younger generations identify with a supposedly authentic antiwar politics -- is symptomatic of a more longstanding mood in art criticism, a mood that emerged in the late 1970s and that I have elsewhere called, following Walter Benjamin, left melancholy. For Benjamin, left melancholy was an attachment to past political ideals that forecloses possibilities of political change in the present. In 2003 Wendy Brown used Benjamin's term to describe the emergence over the previous two decades of traditionalism in left politics. She attributed this return to orthodoxy to, among other things, the rise of sexual politics. Reacting against feminist challenges to the notion that a pregiven economic foundation totalizes both society and emancipatory struggle, subordinating all other social struggles, the left melancholic, observed Brown, clings to "notions of unified movements, social totalities and class-based politics."

When I suggest, after Blanchot, that today's politically impatient, left-melancholic criticism of war is itself warlike, I do not simply mean that it is, in some general sense, aggressive. Rather, I am thinking of Freud's characterization of war in his 1915 essay "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death." Freud commented on the shock and disillusionment evoked in "the citizen of the civilized world" by the First World War. Previously, he said, we had believed that, even if war broke out, courtesy and respect between nations and laws of war that distinguish between civilians and combatants would prevail. We are disillusioned, said Freud, because in this war the state "absolves itself from the guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, and makes unabashed confession of its own rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual has then to sanction in the name of patriotism." Freud's shock over the violation of standards of war may have been, as Michael Sherry puts it, "possible only for a generation that ignored the long record of horrors in centuries of war." Freud, however, criticized his disillusionment from another point of view. Disillusionment, he said, is unjustified because what has been destroyed is, precisely, an illusion -- or, rather, two illusions: that states are guardians of moral standards and that individual members of the highest human civilizations are incapable of brutal behavior. "In reality," wrote Freud, "our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed." Psychoanalysis offers the insight that every earlier development of the mind persists alongside the later stage that arises from it and, therefore, in mental development there is a special capacity for regression. War, Freud speculated, brings about such regression, a regression to aggressive impulses and to a capacity for barbarous deeds, which has not been eradicated in the individual but only held in check by a community that now sanctions it. In fact, "The individual citizen can with horror convince himself in this war of what would occasionally cross his mind in peace-time -- that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it wants to monopolize it, like salt and tobacco." What is more, said Freud, war is a regression not only to barbarism but also to "the instinctive and impulsive heroism" of the unconscious, which does not know its own death and "flouts danger in the spirit of . . . : 'Nothing can happen to me. '" War, in Freud's view, gives full play to grandiose fantasies of invincibility, which is to say, to heroic masculinism, understood as an orientation toward ideals of wholeness that disavow vulnerability.

In my response to October 's survey, I argued that regression to heroic masculinism in the current situation of war isn't confined to pro-war forces but extends to sectors of the left opposition, sectors that I have now identified as impatient and melancholic. Antiwar cultural criticism, that is, often uses the urgency of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to legitimize a return to a totalizing political analysis, and this return has a narcissistic dimension, not only because it idealizes an earlier political moment with which the left melancholic identifies himself but also because, as Brown argued, this analysis once formed the basis of leftist self-love, giving "its adherents a clear and certain path toward the good, the right, the true." Predictably, then, today's impatient criticism is impatient not only with the poetic or artistic, as Blanchot would have it, but also with feminist interrogations of the meaning of the political. For it was feminism, particularly psychoanalytic feminism, now often treated as a feminized luxury we can no longer afford, that explored the role played by totalizing images in producing and maintaining heroic, which is to say, warlike subjects.

As a corollary of its impatience with feminism, which has long insisted on the inseparability of the personal and the political and on a politics concerned with subjectivity, melancholic antiwar criticism tries to divide the subjective and the material, the public and the private, and the social and the psychic as though war has nothing to do with mental life, as though there is no work of the psyche in the waging of war. In this, antiwar criticism mimics dominant discourse about war: recall, for example, President Bush's assertion that he wasn't going to go on the couch about Iraq or Truman's statement after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: "I don't believe in speculating on the mental feeling." Art historian Mignon Nixon has argued against this current refusal to understand war in psychic terms: "The habit of separating the psychical from the social," writes Nixon, "the individual subject from social subjectivity, even seems redoubled in times of war -- as if waging war depends upon holding these terms apart. . . . Even now, in the political discourse surrounding the Iraq War, the psychical and the social are split, even on the Left; as if to reflect on subjectivity in time of war were, in itself, to reject the political, even to diminish resistance to war." October 's survey seemed to raise the issue of subjectivity when it asked if the prevalence of antiwar activity on the Internet implies a transformation of the sense of a political public subject. But since the editors posed the question within a Habermasian framework, in which transformation of the public sphere is tantamount to a decline into passivity and privacy, they foreclosed the question of subjectivity -- of subjectivity as a question -- at the very moment they seemed to open it. They issued a plea to resuscitate a traditional notion of the political subject -- unitary, preconstituted, and self-possessed, one who enters an equally traditional public space of protest -- instead of recognizing a political subject that, as Simon Leung put it in his response, "is formed by the relationship between the self and the other in the polis." October thus ignored the ways in which, for decades, the sense of a political subject has indeed been transformed not only by the Internet but by feminism, psychoanalysis, and poststructuralism. Warlike antiwar criticism's division of public and private is a weapon wielded, in the service of a fantasy of mastery, against uncertainty in the self and the exposure to otherness in public space.

Still, October posed a good question: What can art offer in the current situation of war? About twenty years ago, the British analyst Hanna Segal, cofounder of Psychoanalysts for the Prevention of Nuclear War, addressed a similar question to her field. Writing about the threat of nuclear war, Segal asked, "What can psychoanalysis possibly offer in such a situation?" Her answer: "It is not pathological to hope for a better future -- for instance, peace -- and to strive for it, while recognizing how hard it is to attain, and that the opposition to it comes not only from others but also has its roots in ourselves." Psychoanalysis, said Segal, can help us understand the intimate connection between war and what she called psychic facts, which include our own aggressive impulses. Twenty years earlier, Wilfred R. Bion, a follower, like Segal, of Melanie Klein and an elaborator of Freud's ideas about group psychology, also suggested that psychoanalysis has something to say about social problems: "Society, like the individual, may not want to deal with its distresses by psychological means until driven to do so by a realization that some at least of these distresses are psychological in origin." Still earlier, in 1934, Roger Money-Kyrle, another Kleinian analyst, also responded to Segal's question, writing that the more we realize how the destructive impulses that break out in war are always present in our unconscious minds, "the more likely we shall be to take all possible precautions." And recently, in an essay that brings Freud's ideas to bear on Abu Ghraib, Jacqueline Rose echoed the Kleinians: "It is a central tenet of psychoanalysis," writes Rose, "that if we can tolerate what is most disorienting -- disillusioning -- about our own unconscious, we are less likely to act on it, less inclined to strike out in a desperate attempt to assign the horrors of the world to someone, or somewhere, else. It is not . . . the impulse that is dangerous but the ruthlessness of our attempts to be rid of it.

These authors, by contrast with politically impatient art critics, articulate a critique of subjectivity with concrete political phenomena, in this case, the phenomenon of war, suggesting that to refuse the interpretive power of psychoanalysis in dealing with violence and to attempt to come to terms with war by working only with conscious processes is to fail to take account of how resistant, deep, and enduring war is. What is socially and historically relative about specific wars needs to be thought in relation to what the Italian analyst Franco Fornari, author of The Psychoanalysis of War, called "war as a specific social institution," one that persists beyond any single social formation. Fornari disputed the oft-expressed thesis that the psychoanalytic approach to war is nonspecific because it is metahistorical, arguing instead that, whereas economic, political, and ideological factors are specifically generators of conflicts, they are not specific factors of war. When conflicts are expressed in the form of war, said Fornari, it means that a new fact has come into existence. Tracing this new fact to the subject, he urged us to take responsibility for our unconscious, which I take to mean not only acknowledging the psychic dimensions of war but, as Rose advocates, avowing what is most disillusioning about ourselves.

In bringing together October 's question about art's relationship to war and Segal's corresponding question about psychoanalysis, I do not mean to elide the difference between the two fields. Yet, because contemporary art, especially since the 1980s, has stressed that a work of art is not a discrete entity but, rather, a term in a relationship with viewers; because, in so doing, art has developed strategies for what Theodor Adorno called turning toward the subject; and because these strategies question the rigid forms of identity and triumphalist fantasies whose maintenance helps cause war, there is, I think, a convergence between contemporary art and psychoanalysis. Therefore answers to the questions about the two may have points of similarity. As a contribution to current discourse about art and war, I want to use these essays to explore art's ability to combine a concern for subjectivity with a concern about the problem of war and therefore to resist both dominant and left melancholic discourses. I'll conduct my exploration by discussing three contemporary artworks: all videos that have been shown in art institutions. The thematic content of each video is an act of war: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. One video—Krzysztof Wodiczko's Hiroshima Projection of 1999 -- was made after the first Gulf War; the other two -- Silvia Kolbowski's After Hiroshima mon amour of 2005--2008 and Leslie Thornton's Let Me Count the Ways of 2004--200—appeared after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the launching of the "war on terror." Each video is a mnemonic representation that assumes the ethical task of addressing the historic disasters that, though unimaginable, nonetheless happen. Each engages a Benjaminian type of memory that creates a constellation between past and present, in this case, past and present wars. I'll begin with Silvia Kolbowski's After Hiroshima mon amour , a remake of sorts of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour , which was released in 1959, when the search for a modern cinema arose, at least in part, from the imperative of responding to a world made unrecognizable by war. In Resnais's film, a French woman and a Japanese man, each having suffered a World War II--related trauma, become lovers in Hiroshima, a quintessential site of trauma. Kolbowski's video is "after" Hiroshima mon amour in at least three senses: it is subsequent to, in imitation of, and in honor of the film. An abbreviated remake—like the other two works I'll be discussing, it is twenty-two minutes long—it also extends and elaborates some of the principal themes of its source.

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