Jean Baudrillard, Amérique, 1986 – 2

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“Tout autour, les façades en verre fumé sont comme les visages : des surfaces dépolies. C’est comme s’il n’y avait personne à l’intérieur, comme s’il n’y avait personne derrière les visages. Et il n’y a réellement personne. Ainsi va la ville idéale.”

“L’argent est fluide, c’est comme la grâce, il n’est jamais votre. Venir le réclamer est une offense à la divinité. Avez-vous mérité cette faveur ? Qui êtes-vous, et qu’allez-vous en faire ? Vous êtes suspect de vouloir en faire usage, un usage infect forcément, alors que l’argent est si beau dans son état fluide et intemporel, tel qu’il est dans la banque, investi au lieu d’être dépensé. Honte à vous, et baisez la main qui vous le donne.
C’est vrai que la propriété de l’argent brûle, comme le pouvoir, et qu’il faut des gens pour en prendre le risque, ce dont nous devrions leur être éternellement reconnaissants. C’est pourquoi j’hésite à déposer de l’argent dans une banque, j’ai peur de ne jamais oser le reprendre.”

“Pourtant il y a une puissance poétique dans cette tautologie implacable, comme partout où il n’y a rien à comprendre.”

“Les déserts naturels m’affranchissent sur les déserts du signe. Ils m’apprennent à lire en même temps la surface et le mouvement, la géologie et l’immobilité. Ils créent une vision expurgée de tout le reste, les villes, les relations, les événements, les médias. Ils induisent une vision exaltante de la désertification des signes et des hommes. Ils constituent la frontière mentale où viennent échouer les entreprises de la civilisation. Ils sont hors de la sphère et de la circonférence des désirs. Il faut toujours en appeler aux déserts du trop de signification, du trop d’intention et de prétention de la culture. Ils sont notre opérateur mythique.”

“Ce qui saute aux yeux à Paris, c’est le XIX° siècle. Venu de Los Angeles, on atterrit dans le XIX° siècle. Chaque pays porte une prédestination historique, qui en marque presque définitivement les traits. Pour nous, c’est le modèle bourgeois de 89 et la décadence interminable de ce modèle qui dessine le profil de notre paysage.”

 

(Three years later I finished the little book…)

II a choisi de renoncer à ses privilèges, il ne peut rien contre le privilège de l’avoir choisi.

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Voilà un point de départ. Maintenant pourquoi cette coupe dans le temps, ce raccord de souvenirs ? Justement, lui ne peut pas le comprendre. Il ne vient pas d’une autre planète, il vient de notre futur. 4001, l’époque où le cerveau humain est parvenu au stade du plein emploi. Tout fonctionne à la perfection, de ce que nous autres laissons dormir, y compris la mémoire. Conséquence logique : une mémoire totale est une mémoire anesthésiée. Après beaucoup d’histoires d’hommes qui avaient perdu la mémoire, voici celle d’un homme qui a perdu l’oubli… – et qui, par une bizarrerie de sa nature, au lieu d’en tirer orgueil et de mépriser cette humanité du passé et ses ténèbres, s’est pris pour elle d’abord de curiosité, ensuite de compassion. Dans le monde d’où il vient, appeler un souvenir, s’émouvoir devant un portrait, trembler à l’écoute d’une musique ne peuvent être que les signes d’une longue et douloureuse préhistoire. Lui veut comprendre. Ces infirmités du Temps, il les ressent comme une injustice, et à cette injustice il réagit comme le Che, comme les jeunes des Sixties, par l’indignation. C’est un tiers-mondiste du Temps, l’idée que le malheur ait existé dans le passé de sa planète lui est aussi insupportable qu’à eux l’existence la misère dans leur présent.

Naturellement il échouera. Le malheur qu’il découvre lui est aussi inaccessible qu’est inimaginable la misère d’un pays pauvre pour les enfants d’un pays riche. II a choisi de renoncer à ses privilèges, il ne peut rien contre le privilège de l’avoir choisi. Son seul viatique est cela même qui l’a lancé dans cette quête absurde : un cycle de mélodies de Moussorgski. On les chante toujours au quarantième siècle. Le sens s’en est perdu, mais c’est là que pour la première fois il a perçu la présence de cette chose qu’il ne comprenait pas, qui avait à voir avec le malheur et la mémoire, qu’il lui fallait à tout prix essayer de comprendre et vers laquelle, avec une lourdeur de scaphandrier, il s’est mis en marche.

http://chrismarker.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/sans-soleil-commentaire-francais.pdf

 

Shutting out the sun

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Since 1999, Yuichi Hattori, a baby-cheeked counselor who studied at California State University, Northridge, has treated more than thirty hikikomori patients in the modest office attached to his house in the Tokyo suburb of Sayama, just a few minutes’ walk from a sprawling Honda auto factory. While Satoru Saito believes that involving the whole family in therapy is critical in treating hikikomori, and while Tamaki Saito often relies on drugs, Hattori believes his patients need to burst through the internal barriers that suppress their /honne/, or true feelings. Usually that means separating the patient completely from the family.

“The main cause of this problem comes from the suppression of individuality,” Hattori told me the first time we met at his clinic. “This culture does not permit you to express your individual feelings or thoughts, so you must hide them.”

All of Hattori’s patients come from middle- and upper-class households, and more than two-thirds are men. He describes his patients as emotionally starved. “They often don’t understand their own situation. Hikikomori are often like three-year-olds who wander lost in the woods,” he said. By his estimate, 60 percents of his clients have attacked one or both of their parents.

Hattori’s patients have all struggled to become model “good boys and girls” in hopes of gaining the affection of parents who not only have difficulty communicating or expressing love to each other, but who live in a society where open expressions of affection are almost never encouraged. (The psychiatrist Kawai once confided that if he ever told his wife he loved her, she would look at him as if he was crazy.)

Hattori believes hikikomori are at war with their insides, their authentic personality constantly struggling against the personality they think they must create in order to gain love. Having abandoned their own will and innate emotions, his patients suppress their natural identities. Hattori calls this adopted persona the “front personality”, and said young Japanese create this “false front” at an early age ouf of fear of abandonment should their true selves become visible. “The front personality can’t have intimate relations with others’, he explained. This front personality avoids confrontation and suppresses the patient’s authentic, individual personality, hindering a patient’s healthy emotional development. Because these children fear rejection if they let their real or “back” personalities emerge, they create false personalities in an attempt to capture parent’s attention.

Yet the patient’s core, or original, personality doesn’t completely disappear. It is actively suppressed by the front personality, which denies the conscience, critical judgement, and decision-making skills of the core self. With one personality suspended but not eliminated, the two personalities continue in constant struggle. Eventually, Hattori says, most of his patients “burn out”, emotionally exhausted from the struggle taking place whithin them. Ultimately, they become defeated, emontionless zombies.

In Hattori’s analysis, I recognized Kenji, the whispy thirty-four-year-old baseball fan whose inability to master the skill of /tatemae/ had, as he told me, kept im from engaging with others. As a teenager he remembered attending parties and laughing at jokes he didn’t think were funny, just to become an accepted part of the group. “It was another kind of bullying,” he said, “being forced to fit in… It was so tiring to keep up the pretense and to pretend to be like the others that eventually…. I just burned out.”

Hattory argues that it is natural for the conflict between “front” and “back” personalities to emerge among adolescents—especially in the stressful social environment of the school setting. Successfully developing a “false front,” or front personality, is essential for young children if they hope to survive within the rigid Japanese education system. After all, he says, look at Japanese school were children each day study from the same page of the same book as their peer in other, nearly identical classrooms, where children are usually required to wear identical, military-style uniforms; and where teachers follow a detailed set of exacting, intrusive regulations prepared by the Education Ministry and are asked to emphasize rote learning over the development of critical thinking skills. In such a system, there is little room for the deviant, someone who might “cause trouble” by expressing his own creative flair. (This thought often came to me in the grocery store, where the only cucumbers for sale in the vegetable bin were stick-straight. Where did they ship the curvy ones?) Those who can’t navigate the contradictions, who can’t develop the proper “good boy” front personality in order to fit in, who can’t keep their /honne/ under wraps, often find themselves bullied.

Hattori uses a curious procedure to draw out the “inner” self, or /honne/. Often, he takes off his oversized, rectangular glasses and rolls his office chair to within inches of the young man, staring directly into his eyes, talking to him softly, calmly, as if cooing to a pet bird. It’s Hattori’s belief that this direct gaze—a look Japanese seldom experience in daily life— can so unsettle his patient as to eventually force his hidden personality to emerge. Invariably, on the half-dozen occasions when I watched Hattori use this technique—sometimes in person, sometimes on videotape—a dramatic change in the patient’s bearing was clearly visible.

Hattory belives few Japanese therapists undestand the sort of therapy he uses, or even the nature of the syndrome, because they do not appreciate how deeply hikikomori is associated with post-traumatic stress. Hattori also believes that his patients are likely to open up and become more communicative with a Westener than with a fellow Japanese, so he invited me to attend some of his counseling sessions, after securing the patient’s approval.

During one three-hour visit to his clinic, I watched quietly from the side while Hattori worked with Mariko, a twenty-two-year-old woman who suffered from a mild form of Hikikomori. A graduate of a junior college, she could hold down the occasional odd job and had attended about one-third of her university classes. Nonetheless, she was frequently immobilized, could not form normal emotional relationships, and said any form of social conversation made her utterly exhausted. She usually stayed closeted in her bedroom.

Now, sprawled on the red cloth couch in Hattori’s office, this intelligent adult transformed herself into what seemed to me to be a whimpering five-year-old, peevishly kicking her legs out in an obvious bid for attention. Sometimes, she seemed torpid and tranquil, a needy child in search of love. At other moments, she lashed out, saying she wanted to kill her father.

“He’s a coward, he’s not respectable,” Mariko said, spitting out her anger. “I can never undestand what he’s thinking.” Later, in a distant, trancelike state, she described his emotional absence. “He never played with me. I don’t want to become like him.” Prompted by Hattori, she vividly recalled the time when she was a small child, and her father put ugly cicada bugs on her arms, frightening her as she watched television. During those three hours, Mariko often wriggled her shoulderes, hunched up her back, narrowed her gaze, and turned into a grade-school student, her face flushed, describing how she tried to fit into a group without being bullied. “I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes,” she whined.

“I wanted to express myself, but I couldn’t. I played a role so I wouldn’t be bullied by others, but I got very tired trying to keep up appearances.

“When kids get bullied the parents should understand, but they don’t,” she whimpered. “They yell at their kids and tell them to fit in. I only wanted to be regarded as a normal person.”

During this therapy session, Mariko told Hattori that she worried about what others thought of her. “I don’t want to be an adult, I want to be a spoiled child, I want to be indulged,” she said to the therapist dreamily, as if under hypnosis. “I wanted to commit suicide, but couldn’t go through with it.”

— Michael Zielenziger, Shutting out the sun, how Japan created its own lost generation

 

shuttingout-0

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Tokyo Cyberpunk; Kairo, Avalon

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As Carl Gustav Horn has pointed out, in sharp contrast to The Matrix, which offers the “Gnostic revelation of a life revealed to be a dream, to be escaped into reality,” for Oshii “there is no difference between dreams and reality, and escape is a concept without referent; a wish that is a waste of time, for… there is no outside.” Indeed, Oshii has gone out of his way to distinguish Avalon from Hollywood films about virtual reality, such as The Matrix, which always reinstate the metaphysics of reality in the end: “Hollywood films about reality always end with a return to the real world. However, because those real worlds exist inside film, they themselves are lies. Reality is a questionable thing. I didn’t want to do a movie where the characters returned to reality. The reality we experience is an illusion inside the heart of each individual…. For me personally, Ash’s imaginary world is not really any different from what i conceive as my real world. I don’t make any clear distinction.“

— Tokyo Cyberpunk, Consensual hallucinations and the phantoms of electronic presence, “Welcome to Class Real”

 

When Kawashima returns to the computer lab to consult Harue further, she shows him a computer-generated model of social interaction. Harue advices Kawashima not to stare it too long, explaining that if two dots get too close to one another, they die, but if they get too far apart, they are drawn closer. Back at Kawashima’s apartment, Harue sugests that, like the computer simulation, humans may try to connect, but they do not really connect, living separately: “Each of us is living in a disconnected manner [Hitori hitori barabara ni ikiteiru].”
Later, in her apartement, Harue continues this line of conversation, offering strong social commentary on the disintegration of the Japanese familly structure, by telling Kawashima that she feels “no connection [kankei nai]” since she is always alone. The fact that we barely see any traces of familly in the entire film (the only exception being a brief scene involving Michi’s mother who scolds her for making no attempt to contact her father, despite living in the same city) underscores the lack of connection felt by the characters. In this scene, framing and composition are used to good effect to underscore the gulf that seperates Harue from Kawashima. As is the case in many of his films, Kurosawa uses doorframes and window frames to differentiate the spaces inhabited by his characters and to emphasize “the isolation of his characters, their distance from one another.” Harue continues her reflections on the death of the social by telling Kawashima that she fears one might be all alone in death, just as one is essentially alone in life. The possibility that nothing changes in death, that one is always alone, wether in life or death, Harue finds the most terrifying ideal of all. Harue Wonders if the eternal now of loneliness—this incessant isolation and sollipsism in life and death—is what it means to be a ghost. […] Harue points to all the solitary Internet users appearing like digital monads via Webcam on the array of computers monitors situated around her apartement and asks how they are different from ghosts: “Are they really alive?” she asks. She concludes that people and ghosts are the same, whether dead or alive. In her view, the plethora of aimless, isolated Internet users demonstrates that ghosts are not just a metaphor for the dead, they are also a metaphor for the loss of human connection, for the desperate attempt to make contact but the eternal impossibility of fully doing so. When Harue looks at the ghostlike, solitary individuals who appear like empty shells via Webcam on the “Would you like to see meet a ghost?“ Web site, it is clear that she also sees herself reflected on the screen.

In interviews, the director has suggested that, in addition to their lack of connection, ghosts are also distinguished by their lack of emotion: “i’ve never seen a ghost [yurei] first-hand, but i don’t believe that ghosts are full of hatred or resentement or anger. They’re commonly portrayed to be filled with emotion, but i think that ghosts are beings that lack human emotion and personality. They’re human-like, but all the emotional elements of a normal person are missing. They’re empty shells. That’s what scares me when it comes to ghosts.” In this way, Kurosawa offers of conception of “yurei” (ghosts, specters, apparitions, or phantoms) that is worlds away from the representation of ghosts as “evil spirits” purveyed in Hollywood.
Harue does not believe that ghosts are setting out to kill people  because they would simply create more ghosts. Instead she suggests that ghosts may be trying to make peple immortal “by quietly trapping them in their own loneliness.” The fact that Harue later commits suicide in the film right before Kawashima’s eyes underscores the nihilistic feelings of isolation and lack of connectin that she expresses in this scene.
[…]
The electronic circuit (kairo) is not only a metaphor in the film for the technological means by which ghosts pass into the world of the living but also an allegory for our loss of connection with one another in an increasingly technological world. However, rather than simply offering a retread of Nakata Hideo’s Ringu (1998), Kurosawa raises techno-horror to another level by underscoring its sociological subtexts, situating the narrative of Kairo in terms of a social disorder known as hikikomori (literally, a combination of “pull away” and “seclude onself”) that is plaguing contemporary Japanese society.

[…]
Those affecter by the disorder often cut off communication not only with the outside world but also with familly members, even going so far as to eat meals alone in their darkened rooms. When Harue tells Kawashima that she feels no connection to her familly and that she is “living in a disconnected manner [barabara ni iketeiru],” broken apart from others, she uses the language and expressions of a hikikomori.
[….]
And Japanese novelist Murakami Ryu, who has written a novel and numerous essays about the problem of hikikomori, agrees:

So maybe Japan’s socially withdrawn kids are a harbinger of a new way of life, one forged by the vast changes in the country has undergone in recent years. Japanese society is caught in a paradox: it is concerned with the increase of socially withdrawn kids, while at thte same time it applauds the gizmos like the new Sony PlayStation, which comes equipped with an internet terminal and a DVD player. Technology like that has made it possible to produce animated movies and graphics, as well as conduct commercial transactions, without ever stepping outside the house. It inevitably fixes people in their individual space. In this information society, none of us can be free from being somewhat socially withdrawn…. “Socially withdrawn” people find it extremely painful to communicate with the outside world, and thus they turn to the tools that bring virtual reality in their closed rooms.
Although it is too simplistic to suggest that technology alone is to blame for the current plight of the hikikomori, there is no question that the “the TV’s and computers and videogames that hikimori rely on to fill out the tedious hours” are serious enablers of their self-imposed seclusion.
[…]
Hikikomori experts have speculated that modern Japanese society has sown the seeds of its own social disorders in many ways, due to a compounding of multiple factors. First, Japanese working conditions have effectively cut off a father from inteacting with his child, thereby creating the conditions for codependency with the mother (know as amae). Second, Japanese society puts extreme pressure on young people to succeed academically and perpetuate the status quoi. Third, the recession that has plagued the Japanese economy since the 1990s has undercut the expectations of lifetime employment most commonly associated with postindustrial ideals of Japan’s status quoi. Whatever its causes, the silent epidemic of social withdrawal is wreaking havoc on the social fabric of Japanese society and creating a “lost generation” of shut-ins that will place enormous stress on Japan’s health and welfare systems in the years ahead.

— Tokyo Cyberpunk, Consensual Hallucinations and the Phantoms of Electronic Presence in Kairo and Avalon, Letting In Ghosts, Shutting Out The Sun

 

Anaïs Nin, Anna Kavan

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“I have always admired Anna Kavan among the few writers who dared to explore the nocturnal world of our dreams, fantasies, and imagination. It takes courage and great skill in expression. As the events of the world prove the constancy of irrationalism, it becomes absurd to treat such events with rational logic. But people prefer to accept the notion of the absurd rather than to search for the meaning, the symbolic act which is quite clear in whoever is willing to decipher the unconscious. R.D. Laing writes in The Politics of Experience: ‘We all live in hope that authentic meetings between human beings can still occur. Psychotherapy consists in the paring away of all that stands between us, the props, masks, roles, lies, defenses, anxieties, projections ,and introjections, in short, all the carry-over from the past. Transference and countertransference that we use by habit and collusion, wittingly or unwittingly, as our currency for relationship.’

The writer who follows the designs and patterns of the unconscious achieves the same revelation. From the very first Anna Kavan went into this realm with The House of Sleep (a significant beginning) then with a classic equal to the works of Kafka titled Asylum Piece, in which the non-rational human beings caught in a web of unreality still struggle to maintain a dialogue with those who cannot understand them. In later books the waking dreamers no longer try, they simply tell of their adventures. They live in isolation with their shadows, hallucinations, prophesies. We admire the deep sea divers exploring the depths of the sea. We do not admire enough those who are able to describe their nocturnal experiences. Those who demonstrate that the surface does not contain a key to authentic experience, that the truth lies in what we feel and not what we see, or how we see it. Familiarity with inner landscapes would in the end illume the mysteries of the human mind. The scientist can report psychological findings but the writer has been there. His is a first hand report. And this is not a personal, unique voyage to the antipodes of the mind—the unconscious is a universal ocean in which all of us have roots.”

— Anaïs Nin, from The Novel of the Future amended to serve as an Introduction to Ice (not used so far) /via housesofsleep.tumblr.com

 

Illustration:

Ice-inspired illustration: a halucinatory half-frozen diorama, built and photographed by Kris Hofmann. The scene was built inside a kind of huge aquarium, filled with water, and photographed from every side as it slowly froze solid.

Une représentation à l’asile

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Mais, bien sûr, il n’est pas bon de se lamenter, de se plaindre ou d’élever des protestations auxquelles personne ne fait attention et qui peuvent même, pour tout ce que je sais, être finalement utilisés contre moi et à mon désavantage.

***

Avec n’importe qui d’autre, j’avais dû être réservée et soupçonneuse, me souvenant du proverbe: “Le silence est un ami qui ne trahit jamais personne.” Car comment pourrais-je savoir si la personne à qui je parle n’est pas un ennemi, ou peut-être en relation avec mes accusateurs ou avec ceux qui vont ultérieurement décider de mon destin ?

***

J’en arrivais à penser à que si je ne sortais pas de ce cercle vicieux, j’allais devenir folle, que j’allais crier, que j’allais commettre un acte de violence éhonté dans la rue. Mais le fait de savoir que les lois de mon tempérament m’interdiraient ne serait-ce qu’un soulagement de cet ordre, que j’étais inexorablement emprisonnée dans ma détermination à ne laisser paraître aucune émotion était pire que tout.

 

Extraits de quelques courtes nouvelles d’Asylum Piece de Anna Kavan, relues ce soir, rapidement…
Hormis ça, elle évoque et invoque Kafka de manière assez intéressante dans un certain nombre de nouvelles de ce recueil.

Italo Calvino, I

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CONTINUOUS CITIES • 2

IF ON ARRIVING at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.

— Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

 

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

— Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

 

I mean that from a pure and simple state of lack nothing can be born, nothing good and nothing bad, only other lacks including finally the lack of life, a condition notoriously neither good nor bad.

— Italo Calvino, t zero

 

But when you can do nothing because of the lack of an outside world, the only doing you can allow yourself with the scant means at your disposal is that special kind of doing that is saying.

— Italo Calvino, t zero