Surviving Fascination
Abstract
Traditionally, fascination has been conceived of as an experience of heightened attention on the verge of being unbearable – immobilizing, ungraspable and indeed alluring up to the point of losing control. Today, however, the term is mostly used in an exclusively positive way, indicating strong commitment and the fact that someone or something is worth being extremely attentive to. It seems almost a virtue. In this article, I start from the question what it takes to make the unbearable experience of fascination endure in a literary work of art, both in reference to the French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot and to a recent novel of the Flemish writer Yves Petry. Subsequently, I question why one would still want to do so and what difference it makes in a cultural age where the interminable reproduction of the term ‘fascination’ mainly functions as a means to keep its essential ambivalence at distance, and which therefore gives way to the production of total indifference. After an attempt at culturally analyzing this discursive situation, I take the case of the artist as exemplary in trying to elucidate, with the help of Jean-Paul Sartre and Blanchot, what kind of experience fascination actually entails: not a matter of personal interest, but an imaginary experience of radical absence – and therefore an almost unbearable one. Since it is connected, for this very reason, to our capacity to surpass ourselves or at metamorphosis, I finally develop a theory (featuring Donald Winnicott) that goes beyond today’s cultural use of the term by means of a proposal for dealing (artistically) with its survival. In this way, I eventually try to answer the question how to survive fascination as a royal pathway to indifference while rescuing its critical power.
Tom Van Imschoot
Résumé
Traditionnellement, la fascination est conçue comme une expérience d’attention intensifiée, à la limite de l’intolérable – immobilisante, insaisissable, et en effet invitant à la perte de contrôle. Aujourd’hui, toutefois, la notion est utilisée principalement dans un sens positif, renvoyant à un engagement fort et au fait qu’une personne ou une chose mérite une attention extrême, et semble presque une qualité. Cet article prend comme point de départ la question de savoir comment une expérience intolérable de fascination peut perdurer dans une œuvre littéraire ou artistique, à partir des travaux de l’écrivain et critique français Maurice Blanchot et d’un roman récent de l’écrivain flamand Yves Petry. Ensuite, nous nous interrogeons sur la nécessité, éprouvée par le créateur, d’une telle démarche, et sur son rôle à une époque où la reproduction interminable de la notion de « fascination » fonctionne principalement comme un moyen de tenir son ambivalence essentielle à distance, et qui donne lieu ainsi à la production d’une indifférence totale. Après une tentative d’analyse de cette situation discursive culturelle, nous examinons en quoi l’artiste peut essayer d’éclairer la fascination en tant qu’expérience réelle. Enfin, nous développons une théorie (notamment à partir des travaux de Donald Winnicott) qui cherche à répondre à la question de savoir comment survivre à la fascination comme voie royale vers l’indifférence tout en sauvant sa force critique.
Keywords
Culture of fascination, fascination and indifference, aesthetics of fascination, Maurice Blanchot, Winnicot’s transitional objects, Yves Petry’s De Maagd Marino (“Marino the Maid”)
Ever since Ulysses narrowly survived his encounter with the alluring Sirens, the experience of fascination has become associated with an unbearable attraction that one needs to endure in order to survive. The enticement of their singing opened an abyss one could not escape from, (mis)leading the navigator who encountered the imaginary sense of perfection they promised in the illusory perfectum of having already reached it, where one drowned into deadly silence. End of story, one is tempted to say. But this is precisely where the story of this essay begins. For we all know that Ulysses eventually survived his mortal fascination. Or at least, this is precisely what Homer recounts, turning the unendurable song of the Sirens into a source of his tale on Ulysses’ endurance. Yet, what did Homer keep silent in doing so? In his lucid recounting of Ulysses’ encounter with the imaginary and the song of the Sirens, the French writer and critic Maurice Blanchot once claimed that an obscure secret was buried underneath this staged survival. I believe it is worth excavating so as to explore the stage of (surviving) fascination I am interested in here.
A very obscure struggle takes place between every tale [récit] and the encounter with the Sirens ... A struggle in which Ulysses’ prudence ... has always been exercised and perfected. What we call the novel [roman] was born of this struggle. What lies in the foreground of the novel is the previous voyage, the voyage which takes Ulysses to the moment of the encounter. ... Diversion is its profound song. To keep changing direction, to move on in an apparently random way, avoiding all goals, with an uneasy motion that is transformed into a happy distraction – this has been its primary and most secure justification. ... The tale begins at a point where the novel does not go, though in its refusals and its rich neglect it is leading towards it. Heroically, pretentiously, the tale is the tale of a single episode, that in which Ulysses encounters the inadequate and enticing song of the Sirens. (Blanchot 445-446)
If indeed, as Blanchot tells us, both the novel and the tale imply a relation with the ‘obscure struggle’ that is exemplified by Ulysses’ fascinated meeting with the Sirens, this implies that both fascination and the need to survive it form a primordial yet paradoxical condition for writing and storytelling. Yet, what does this mean? Does it mean more than having a portion of wax at one’s disposal? Does it mean more than staging the scene of one’s fascination, and then showing oneself to be clever enough to avoid its trap? Does this mean that storytelling and literary writing boil down to showing off one’s proximity to something unbearable while at the same time safeguarding a privileged, distanced position from the threat it exposes one to, like it is the case in the experience of the sublime?
Surely, the artful, slick and cunning Ulysses has never been known to be a writer or an artist. It is most interesting, therefore, that Blanchot argues Ulysses needed to transform into Homer so as to recount the exceptional event he survived. In a tale, Blanchot writes,
[s]omethinghas happened, something which someone has experienced who tells about it afterwards, in the same way that Ulysses needed to experience the event and survive it to become Homer, who told about it. Of course the tale is usually about an exceptional event, one which eludes the forms of everyday time and the world of the usual sort of truth, perhaps any truth. ... Yet if we regard the tale as the true telling of an exceptional event which has taken place and which someone is trying
to report, then we have not even come close to sensing the true nature of the tale. The tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to that event, the place where the event is made to happen. (Blanchot 446-447)
Apparently, a metamorphosis needs to take place, changing the fascinated observer into a witness who represents it from a distance. But this change of perspective only deepens the question. For how does one reconcile the need for a metamorphosis that turns fascination into communication and therefore allows the writer to endure its event in a story on the one hand, with the need for this fascination to be experienced by the story’s subject as the event of an extreme attraction that it cannot endure, at the risk of being fatal, on the other hand? Put simply, how does one capture the unendurable to which one is attracted in the experience of fascination within the limits of a story’s duration? By turning the story into the event itself, Blanchot says. Yet, how does one survive its ‘survival’?
Fatal Attraction?
A wonderful case to both concretize and explore this seemingly abstract question is provided by the fifth novel of the Flemish writer Yves Petry, De Maagd Marino (Marino The Maid, 2010). The novel tells the fictional tale of a fatal encounter. It starts, as if utterly fascinated, with the end: a bewildering death scene, as theatrical as it is visceral, as crazy as it is deadly serious. An anonymous man in underpants, drugged but determined, is tied up, castrated, cut into pieces and buried, having first bled to death in a convulsion of pain. The executioner is his lover Marino, who appears to have wanted to eat him. This already sounds unendurable. But what is most perplexing, is that it is all done by arrangement, in accordance with a strict scenario. The two men had even dug the grave of the killed man together beforehand. In other words, they realise a shared phantasm. The cannibalistic murder turns out to be a ‘contract’ suicide.
Of course, there is a clear allusion to the case of the ‘cannibal of Rothenburg’, which caused a shockwave in 2006. But Petry never makes this reference explicit. Much more than being fascinated by the journalistic reality and its abhorring sensationalism, he is intrigued by both the extremity of the situation and the intimacy of the relationship it is imaginarily conditioned by. For this reason, Petry does There exists a domain in which death signifies not only our disappearance, but the unbearable process by which,
despite ourselves, we disappear, even when, at all costs,
we must not disappear. It is precisely this at all costs, this despite ourselves, that distinguishes the moment of extreme joy and an indescribable but miraculous ecstasy. If there is nothing which surpasses man, which surpasses us despite ourselves, which, at all costs, must not be, we will never attain the insensate moment towards which we strive with all our strength, but which, at the same time, we use all our strength to avert.
not concentrate on the real ‘facts’, but on a fictional account of the encounter that the realisation of this cannibalistic phantasm presupposes, however inconceivable it may be. This is not only due to the fact that this very phantasm has been fascinating Petry, and haunting his novels as a centripetal motif, long before the real case of Rothenburg took place. Petry’s novelistic focus on the storyline leading up to the fascinating encounter of both men also has to do with the fact that a strong appeal has to be made to the imagination in order to give the inconceivability of their shared phantasm’s realisation an appearance of reality at all. Eventually, this is precisely what interests Petry in literature, however paradoxical it seems: penetrating the inconceivable by means of the imagination, and at the same time, through this configuration of an unendurable yet fascinating scene, unmasking what we imagine ourselves to be in so-called daily reality, including the fictions we live by.
As a matter of fact, the appeal to the imagination this novel makes assumes the form of a fiction that defies the reader’s imagination: a man’s voice survives through the mouth of the man who has eaten him. Starting from the second of the twenty-six short chapters, Petry traces the course of the fictional lives of the cannibal Marino and Bruno Klaus, as the assisted suicide turns out to be called. The story is written in Marino’s prison cell, some time after his trial. Things could hardly be more lonely, yet Marino is not alone. However dissociated this sounds, it is the voice of the devoured Bruno that dictates the words of the story that Marino is noting down in the solitude of his cell, as if Bruno is reincarnated in Marino as the ‘writer’. Of course, this is only possible as a delusion of Marino’s, yet the reader is drawn into this apparent insanity, for it is from Bruno’s angle that the story is told. He appears to be the ‘I-sayer’ (‘ik-zegger’), as he himself calls it, and Marino is no more than a passive body, an impersonal maid, a ‘he’ who lends his writing hand to the words Bruno dictates to him, being the narrative voice Marino hears in his head. The reader knows that he cannot believe this: this must be fiction, Bruno is dead. But it is exactly via the consciousness of this fiction that Petry is able to face the reader with his ultimate literary target: the very fiction of individual consciousness, the ‘identity’ one calls ‘I’.
Marino’s case illustrates this perfectly. As an eternal virgin and a sickly mother’s child, imprisoned in a body that is far too big and that is incapable of communication (except by means of computer), one can barely call him an individual. He suffers from a lack of ‘I’. In fact, he is so enigmatic in this that every attempt at explanation, such as his grotesquely huge Oedipus complex, becomes its own caricature – a parody on the explanatory fictions that traditionally frame the origin of our individuality. Likewise, it is precisely because of Marino’s all too literal desire to fill his own void, i.e. the caricaturesque emptiness of his character’s very (fictional) existence, that Bruno seems just the person he needed. After all, Bruno’s decision consists precisely of dying from his ‘I’. As a teacher of literature he suffers from an overdeveloped self-awareness. This is why he wants to distance himself from his university post (and from literature in general) and why he throws himself into a mindless riot of anonymous sex and porn. He is under the impression that in Marino’s deathlike character he has found the enlightenment he was looking for. It is mainly through him, who is essentially the novel’s main character, but, as first-person writer, also no more than a linguistic fiction of the insane Marino, that Petry indulges himself as a writer: virtually impersonally. “After all,” Bruno says, when he tries to motivate his Sein zum Tode, “we could not carry on endlessly with our individualist lifestyle without also becoming individuals at some point.” (114)
At the end of this essay, I would like to discuss why there appears to be a connection between surviving one’s fascination and becoming an individual, as the latter quote suggests. For now, however, the important observation is that this very metamorphosis is presented through the intriguing account of a fascinating event that is based on an unbearable real fact, but of which the realization can only be endured within the confines of a fiction. It is a story, that is to say, in which a man survives his own death and is able to bear witness to it, through becoming the phantasmal object of another subject’s desire to incarnate him and be inspired by his real life, i.e. up to becoming nothing but his acoustic mask (or persona). Eventually, Marino is nothing but an imaginary body that only exists through its appearance in the verbal account of the transgression that he thinks Bruno dictates to him within the confines of his prison cell. Yet, while this is true, it is only in the fiction of his (schizoid) consciousness that Bruno is eventually able to survive the deadly, unendurable attraction of the transgression to which his fascination for Marino leads him – silently locked up within the limits of a book, nothing but a book. As such, the novel testifies to an experience of fascination whose enduring existence (or survival) only originates through its being written, starting with the unbearable end (both tail and tale) of two men’s imaginary encounter, realizing their fatally shared phantasm. To quote Blanchot:
This is a very delicate relationship, undoubtedly a kind of extravagance, but it is the secret law of the tale. The tale is a movement towards a point, a point which is not only unknown, obscure, foreign, but such that apart from this movement it does not seem to have any sort of real prior existence, and yet it is so imperious that the tale derives its power of attraction only from this point, so that it cannot even “begin” before reaching it – and yet only the tale and the unpredictable movement of the tale create the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring. (Blanchot 447)
It is not difficult to see that the staggering opening scene of De Maagd Marino – fascinating as well as testifying to the fascination out of which the novel originated – is the abyssal point, both imperious and a priori non-existent, toward or with regard to which the rest of the novel is simultaneously an approach and a retrospection. What makes De Maagd Marino all the more interesting, however, is that the book resumes the themes of intimacy and identity, sexuality and masculinity that, as I have said, already fascinated the author in his previous novels (Van Imschoot 2012). In fact, one might say that De Maagd
Marino stages the confrontation with a fascination that Petry’s work has shown since his debut in 1999:
a fascination that circles around the image (and the partly homosexual, partly allegorical phantasm) of one man inside another man, constantly featuring male characters that act both as obscure protagonists and as overtly transparent personae for the male narrator. In his fifth novel, this very fascination (and the tension between reality and illusion, body and imagination inherent to it) is taken to extremes, being at the same time literally realized and entirely imaginary. The ensuing ambivalence is, technically speaking, mainly the result of the schizoid narrative perspective – i.e. a perspective inspired by an improbably real element, yet which is only probable within the maddening reality of a fiction. More fundamentally, however, it poses the question as to how a writer survives such a direct confrontation with the phantasmal source of fascination to which his writing has indirectly always been attracted.
lie in a sort of anecdotal curiosity as to how this specific writer will carry on in his next novel. Rather, I want to ask on a general level what it entails to endure one’s fascination, beyond the unbearable to which it attracts one. Is fascination endurable at all? Can it be fatal? And if so, why has our cultural discourse become so imperatively obsessed with it? Could it be that the metaphorical use we often make of it, especially while talking about art, is a means to avoid and advert the unbearable state of intransitivity the experience of fascination puts us in? But then again, why does an experience in which one risks to disappear appear so attractive?
The Use of Fascination
AsAndreasDegen has outlined in his survey of the semantic history of the term “fascination” from antiquity untilmoderntimes,“Concepts of Fascination, from Democritus to Kant” (2012), allpre-modern approaches of the term shared the assumption that “fascination ha[d] to do with an actual influence of an external substance or power (like eidola, pneuma, demons, the Devil or foreign willpower) on a living being” (388). However different or applied to different fields these approaches were, they were basically transitive. Moreover, they mainly – and, until the fifteenth century “without exception” – considered fascination tohave “an extremelydamaging effect” (373).This changedinthe eighteenth centurydue to an epistemological paradigm shift related to visual perception, magic and imagination. The transitive concept of fascination was replaced by a new concept, based on an intransitive and figurative meaning of the term. Many a thinker kept on conceiving of fascination as the source of enchantments, fallacies and even as “the most universal of all evils”, yet it was no longer linked to a magical exertion of power or related to specific properties of an object. In fact, Kant “connected itwith irresistibilityand a quality of feeling” which basically stemmed from “a problem of judgement” (Degen 392). Thus, for the first time, fascination was considered as “an increase of attention”, an understanding which keeps on informingmore recent explanations,such as Ackbar Abbas’ definition of fascination as “any experience that captures our attention without at the same time submitting entirely to our understanding” (qtd. in Degen 372).
Whereas Kant remained strongly negative about fascination, describing it as “a mental weakness resulting from an affective disorder” (Degen 392), its mainly metaphorical use over the last two centuries appears to have gone hand in hand with a (gradual) disappearance of this former negative connotation. In fact,todeclare oneself fascinated seems to have become a crucial prerequisite for postmodern self-fashioning: it has become something to show off with or at least to be proud of, at least if one wants
Our childhood fascinates us because it is the moment of fascination, it is fascinated itself, and this golden age seems bathed in a light that is splendid because it is unrevealed, but the fact is that light is alien to revelation, has nothing to reveal, is pure reflection, a ray that isstillonly the radiance of an image.
to be heard, or taken seriously. Thus, fascination has become recommended by now.Avirtue, almost. Praiseworthy, since indirectly praising the worth of the thing it is applied to. Utterly attractive, since testifying to extreme attraction. An example might be clarifying. Acouple of years ago the University of Amsterdam builta publicwebsite with a collection of filmed interviews under the heading of fascination, featuring academic experts from all kinds of scientific disciplines, who were indiscriminately portrayed with their so-called fascination as the distinguishing feature. In fact, these experts did not convincingly display fascination at all. It seemed as if actors had been asked to feign passion: wide-eyed and with emphatic gestures, but basically merely talking in the usual way about their field and main research interests. The mainly performative function of portraying them as such is not so hard to fathom, however. Since thesefilms were made for promotional purposes,showingthecommitment of the person behind the work so as to make an audience passionate aboutscientificresearchtoo,the authority of these experts – or the need to listen to them – was meant to be reinforced by attributing the predicate of “being fascinated” to them.1
At first sight, this appears pretty strange. Why would utterly diverse scientists – both in terms of their fields, and their personalities – agree to be attributed a common denominator that refersto an experience which Kant understood as resulting from a problem of judgment? Isn’t this undermining all scientific authority, traditionally based on distance and objectivity? At closer inspection, however, the institutionally mediated, performative gesture underlying it is actually exploiting the intransitive understanding of the term (in the sense of “an increase of attention”) so as to activate the age-old use fascination has always been put to: the (imperceptible) exertion of influence of a power on another body. In other words, to show or to portray these scientists as being fascinated is ultimately meant to make them fascinating. The veryincrease of attention they themselvestestify to in proclaiming themselves fascinated, as if thiskind of attention is a conditio sinequa nonforbecominga trulysuccessfulresearcher, is actually aiming at a (fascinated) increase of our own attention in watching and listening to them. In short, the discursive production offascination is (wishfully)thought to be reproduced in us.
This is exactly how ‘fascination’ functions in nearly all instances of everyday language in which it is used nowadays,whetherconscious (in promotional talk)ornot (inconversation). For who would contradict someone who pronounces him- or herself to be fascinated? Is there anythingmore personal and therefore less negotiable than the thing someone is fascinated by? Is there anythingmore authoritative, for that matter? Infact,although itimplicitly still refersto a problem of judgment(‘someone is fascinated, because something appears to be fascinating’), theensuingtautology is actually exploitedmost of the time so as to arrest the faculty to judge of whoever is receiving the utterance of someone’s fascination or a thing’s fascinating quality.
Thereason for this, and therefore also the reason why the term fascination has become such an imperial strategy in today’s discourse, is complex and beyond the scope of this essay. However, in order to deal with the ensuing situation for today’s artistic practice (as I will try to do), two aspects need to be addressed. Firstly, the overall and ever-widening use of the term ‘fascination’in today’s discourseis a 1 “De Fascinatie”, being the name of the program (featuring 19 videos of about 10 minutes), can be found on youtube, see: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM-mb7IpX4mr1q4rUwG6oTSadp7HMyHaG, d.d. 01.10.2013
matter of language. Althoughit seems paradoxical that one would revert to acommon denominator when asked to express a most personal experience, the use of the term ‘fascination’ as an ultimate signifier is of course partly due to the fact that it refers toa linguistic terminus (a limit in language) beyond which nothing more can be said – i.e. because of the problem of judgment andthe lack of detachment (implicitly) inherent to it. To call something ‘fascinating’ is to evoke its very experience as an event beyond expression, only to be referred to in terms of its ‘objective’ presence itself, however subjective it really is. As such, our useof the term ‘objectifies’ the extreme subjectivity expressed by it, so to speak. Invoking an experience in which the very distinction between thesubjective and the objective cannot be judged, let alone expressed, it actually uses its extreme and undeniable subjectivity in order to make a seemingly authoritative claim regarding an object’s so-called intrinsic quality. As a result, the ‘increase of attention’ any so-called fascinated subject asks for its subjectivity seems legitimized by the ‘increase of attention’ the so-called fascinating object asks for itself.
Surely, in doing so, today’s use of the term ‘fascination’ reacts to the linguistic erosion to which other subjective expressions of semi-objectivity (e.g. ‘interesting’) have succumbed. To call something or someone ‘interesting’ is hardly powerful enough to make any difference, i.e. to be heard or to increase attention for it. In this sense, the term ‘fascinating’ functions as a superlative that responds to the weakening of similar yet less extreme expressions of subjective attention. It is, however, not hard to see how the ensuing inflation of the term ‘fascination’ fits into the broader cultural logic of late capitalism – its ‘structure of feeling’, as Raymond Williams would have it.
This is the second aspect I would like to outline.AsSianne Ngai hasconvincingly argued regarding ‘the zany’, ‘the cute’ and ‘the interesting’ in Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), weak yet ubiquitous notions such as these help us to grasp “how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). They are in accordance with its social dynamics, or “the increasingly intertwined ways in which late capitalist subjects labor, communicate and consume” (238). Instead of being marginalized, “aesthetic experience has come to saturate virtually every nook andcrannyof the world that postmodern subjects inhabit” (241). Similarly,our current, inflationary and therefore weakened, merely attractive concept of ‘the fascinating’ also functions as an aesthetic category that responds in a veryspecific way to “this hypertrophy of ‘the aesthetic function’ that makes the art and cultureof the presentfunction so distinctive” (242), as Ngai calls it. Yet, whereas Ngai signals out the zany, the cute and the interesting as indices of today’s “desacralizationof the aesthetic ..., causedbythe aesthetic’s hyperbolic expansion”, I want to argue that ‘the fascinating’, which has been connected to ‘the sacred’ by Rudolf Otto, iscurrentlybeingused inresponsetoadestabilization atthe very coreofthis “desacralization ofthe aesthetic”: one affecting therelationbetweenobjectand ‘image’, the real and the imaginary, in short, ‘our world’ and the sacred agency underlying it, the subject. In fact, it isliterallyusedtoput a term to our experience thatobjective reality is increasingly sinking into the imaginary – ‘quasi-objectifying’, that is, so as to bridge the gap between subjectivity and common sense.
Inthissense, today’s trivial, everydayusageof the term ‘fascination’ isclosely linked to the rise of what the Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg has once aptly called “the war for attention”, referring to this
ground-breaking televised event of collective fascination called 9/11. The indistinguishabilty of the shock of what really happened on 9/11and the endless reproduction of its image as the sole entrance to its unimaginable reality is typical for the way fascination functions today as both a means to obtain absolute attention as well as to cover up the loss of reality experienced in it. Leaving asidethe specificextremity of this exceptional case, the example also brings to light how the reproduction of ‘the fascinating’ – up to the point of its trivialization, so as to bring it under control – is key to the ‘attention economy’ that powers today’s media industry. In fact, in a media climate where the economic struggle for our attention is taken to extremes, it can hardly be a surprise that it is precisely fascination – an experience of extreme attention, of absolute and exclusive focus – which provides the ‘model’ that is constantly evoked. As if one counts on the fact that staging fascination will in some magical way also incite (or, indeed, reproduce) it. As if, in the midst of the media-drivenexcessthat angles for ourattention, one hopes to justify the day’s delusion by simulating fascination oneself.Asamodelofsustainedattention, the fascinatinghas literallybecomevalue,ascannot be better illustratedthan by thefactthat thebusiness models powering most of the internet situate their major source of value in the number of clicks and the length of page visits. “Stand still, watch this, hold on!”, they seem to dictate, often in order to urge one to buy.
This comes at a price, however. Whereas the captivating potential of the fascinating in modernity is originally based on the fact that it does not entirely submit to our understanding, its interminable reproduction virtually reduces this ‘otherness’ to the level of personal interest. Very much in tune with the consumer-oriented logic of late capitalist society, in other words, to be fascinated by something becomes an idiosyncratic, strictly personal matter that does not matter to someone else. And this is why it needs to be reproduced ever more desperately, again. At least, if one is tempted to legitimize personal interest by presenting it under the heading of fascination, as late capitalist society (up to the university, apparently) increasingly commands one to do – because of the increase of attention this aesthetic category is supposed to generate. Eventually, we all end up being disinterested, however, verging on indifference. For while its reproduction seems more and more an attempt at ridding ourselves ofthefascinated state we experience vis-à-vis arealitythat (virtually) coincides with its image – in short: at domesticating its ‘otherness’, as the archetypical example of 9/11 clearly shows –, today’s use (and even abuse) of ‘the fascinating’ has less and less to do with fascination at all.
In fact, ‘being fascinated’ has now become just another word for ‘being neutral’. In this regard, Baudrillard refers to “the nihilism” of the system. Its nihilism has the power to cast everything, including the things it repudiates, into indifference. It is notable, therefore, that when dealing withthe nihilismof systematictransparency, the term ‘fascination’ turns up in his writings too, as part of a terminal condition without end.
The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don’t think so – all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by
all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. (160)
The Property of Fascination?
How do artists relate to this ‘general situation’, those people we traditionally have come to see as ‘making work’ out of a constant dealing with their very own fascination? Isn’t it insupportable? Isn’t it neutralizing by total indifference the very resource by means of which the artist may try and claim to make a difference at all, i.e. his or her own fascination? In fact, the dictate of fascination sounds nowhere as loud as in the arts, this area par excellence where passion is professed and put into practice. Critics make it a criterion, artists defend their choices by it, art courses and institutes ask their students or applicants to seek out, examine and present their fascinations. As a matter of fact, fascination accompanies (today’s) artists from the cradle to the grave. Is this a problem? Not necessarily. In a way it is perhaps even unavoidable, given the ‘general situation’ Baudrillard scrutinized. Yet, face to face with this ‘systematic’ objectification of fascination, it is equally unavoidable that the melancholic artist, being dispossessed of the unique property he once called his own, is now confronted with the question what it actually was that he possessed in being fascinated. Was his fascination really his own? Or was he owned by it – haunted, obsessed or possessed? To be sure, we tend to refer to our fascination in terms of the particular object it is attached to, however arbitrary or subjective this might be. Yet, does fascination actually have ‘an object’? Or is it precisely the very lack of any object, the experience of its loss, which makes it unbearable?
In L’Etre et le Néant (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre defines fascination as the experience of “un objet
géant dans un monde désert” (217) – a gigantic object in a deserted world, like a mirage in a barren desert. This concept already gives an excellent indication of the absolute nature with which the ‘fascinosum’ determines the intentional orientation of the viewing subject. Like when in love, our longing is suddenly fully focused on the enchanting other in whom we temporarily think we have found ‘the one’. Thus, fascination is an experience that makes us become engrossed in the moment, an ecstasy whose hallmark is that time seems to stand still and turn into space, since we are at one and the same time fixated and drawn along by the detachment with which ‘something’ appears to us. However momentarily, we have the feeling of staying in a time-space that we can only endure and which is at the same time unendurable. For to exactly the degree to which ‘staying’ refers here to the continuous appearance of the demanding ‘thing’ we are fascinated by, we feel also in danger of disappearing into it, our whole world included, like a sailor vanishing in the sea. Indeed, as Sartre’s metaphor described it: the object appears, the world disappears; the latter being no doubt the reason why the former is clung to by all means – like Ulysses to the mast, in his opposite attempt at staying headstrong in the world and defying the Sirens’ fascination.
However convincing Sartre’s description might seem, Maurice Blanchot punctured it, or partly at least, by indirectly revealing Sartre’s idea of a viewed object as a false metaphor.
Seeing implies distance, the decision that causes separation, the power not to be in contact and to avoid the confusion of contact. Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an
encounter. But what happens when what you see, even though from a distance, seems to touch you with a grasping contact, when the manner of seeing is a contact at a distance? What happens when what is seen imposes itself on your gaze, as though the gaze had been seized, touched, put in contact with appearance? Not an active contact, not the initiative and action that might still remain in a true touch; rather, the gaze is drawn, absorbed into an immobile movement and a depth without depth. What is given to us by contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image. (412)
Blanchot’s coining of ‘fascination’ as ‘passion for the image’ not only supplants Sartre’s idea that there is an object to be seen with the more apt observation that it is a tactile experience of an image (signalling the absence of any perceivable object), his description of fascination as an experience of passion also ties the extreme attraction inherent in fascination to a sense of passivity. After all, experience teaches us that in ‘being fascinated’ the gaze is drawn, swallowed up, or indeed, ‘attracted’. It is taken along a path where looking turns into staring, coming eye to eye with one’s own blind spot, in short: where the gaze runs up against the ‘impossibility’ that is its precondition. In fact, as the affinity between being fascinated and staring indicates, the radical passivity of an eye that no longer sees but is imaginarily inverted by something that makes it impossible to stop looking links fascination to a experience of absence. One is taken by absence, if you like: an absence that separates one from one’s usual presence, being no longer a part of the world but part of a world that is no longer, however temporarily.
Justas distractionprevailsat the heartof extreme concentration, anyonewho isfascinated, anyone who stares, seems to be immersed in oneself, in the resemblance of one’s own image. Herewetouch upon Blanchot’s unusual,even counter-intuitivenotionoftheimage.It explains also, however, why his concept of fascination as “passion for the image” heads in the direction of the unbearable. “According to the customary analysis,” Blanchot stealthily engages in a dialogue with Sartre, an image exists “after an object: it follows from it; we see, then we imagine. After the object comes the image” (415). So, first there is an object, and only then an image. It is, as a result, only in the absence of the object – my friend Pierre isn’t here, is Sartre’s example – that the image finds the condition for its appearance – I imagine my friend Pierre, for lack of his presence, Sartre would claim. This is correct, Blanchot says, the imagination, the human ability to imagine, is indeed a way of controlling, of mastering absence. But what, he then continues, if the image ‘unveils’ a fundamental absence in the thing itself, the appearance of an absence that precedes the thing and into which it can again disappear? In other words: what if the image is accompanied by the return of an elementary materiality the thing had overcome in order to become an object? What if the presence of the image confronts one with the continued appearance of the thing as absence, its disappearance that keeps on appearing and therefore its essential resemblance to no-thing? However elusive (or unimaginable), it is clear that the ensuing notion of the image has strong repercussions on what Blanchot sees as the passion for it, the experience of fascination:
It can be said that a person who is fascinated does not perceive any real object, any real form, because what he sees does not belong to the world of reality, but to the indeterminate realm of fascination. A realm that is so to speak absolute. Distance is not excluded from it, but it is
excessive, being the unlimited depth that lies behind the image, a depth that is not alive, not tractable, absolutely present though not provided, where objects sink when they become separated from their meaning, when they subside into their image. This realm of fascination, where what we see seizes our vision and makes it interminable ..., this realm is supremely attractive, fascinating: light that is also the abyss, horrifying and alluring, light in which we sink. (413)
It is striking that Blanchot’s notion of fascination implies a parallel movement of both objects (“they subside into their image”) and (their) subjective experience (“light in which we sink”). It appears, therefore, that for Blanchot both object and subject reciprocally hold one another in the threatening grip of their (mutual) disappearance during the experience of fascination. However imaginary, the subject is turned inside out, while the object (re)turns into its image.
What fascinates us, takes away our power to give it a meaning, abandons its “perceptible” nature, abandons the world, withdraws to the near side of the world and attracts us there, no longer reveals itself to us and yet asserts itself in a presence alien to the present in time and to presence in space. The split, which had been the possibility of seeing, solidifies, right inside the gaze, into impossibility. In this way, in the very thing that makes it possible, the gaze finds the power that neutralizes it – that does not suspend or arrest it, but on the contrary prevents it from ever finishing, cuts it off from all beginning, makes it into a neutral, wandering glimmer that is not extinguished, that does not illuminate: the circle of the gaze, closed on itself. (413)
Here, I believe, we find an accurate description of the extreme subjectivity fascination entails. As a result of the way the object is lost in the image, a fascinated subject loses all objectivity. The only thing that remains for the subject is a passive relation to an image that incapacitates the very condition on which all subjectivity is constructed: the possibility to relate to objects. This is what makes the subject passionate for the image – for without this relation it vanishes. But this is also what makes the experience of fascination intrinsically unbearable, intolerable, for it does not imply an object-relation that is utterly ‘personal’, in spite of the way we commonly use the term nowadays: as a marker of ‘personal interest’. On the contrary, it implies an imaginary experience in which the subject underlying one’s personality being the form of one’s worldly appearance, is precisely at the brink of disappearing. This is its extremity. In fascination, the appearance of the image ‘blurs’ our ability to give sense, to create meaning, and hence, to relate in a personal way to the world (of objects, or the world as an objectivity). In fact, the loss of objectivity in the image’s appearance is the source of a de-subjectivization that is felt to be depersonalizing
However, since the very threat of de-subjectivization incites in any person the impulse to survive, this experience explains of course why we constantly tend to objectify fascination. That is to say, it clarifies why we constantly try to express our fascination in terms of objects. For in being able to pinpoint and localize in a particular object, albeit verbally, the source of an experience which is essentially imaginary (or relating to an image), one actually neutralizes and overcomes the unendurable and intolerable nullification of personality that comes with it. To objectify one’s fascination is a way of distancing oneself from the ‘excessive’ distance that strikes us and holds us passively in its grip in the fascinating image. It is a means of recovery, of regaining control over one’s worldly person, being a
subject with the power to say ‘I’ and, as a result, with the possibility to keep the world at a distance – a tractable object at its disposal, or at least to be subjectively dealt with.
Naturally, this inclination to ‘survive’ fascination by regaining the subjective capacity to objectify and to give meaning is ‘human, all too human’. It is part of the essentially modern ‘technology’ Heidegger analysed in Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938), which pictures the world as mere representation and object – a picture of which the representation negates the absence that Blanchot finds ‘returning’ in the image – and which, according to Heidegger, originated in the historical movement of man becoming a (self-conscious) subject. Yet, since the world as we were used to picture it, is nowadays (virtually) ‘subsiding’ in its image, the question is now whether our inevitable inclination to survive its fascination can still make a difference at all, vis-à-vis the general situation which appeared to Baudrillard as a nihilistic “precession of ... forms of the neutral and of indifference”. Put differently, is any neutralizing objectification of what truly fascinates us not merely adding up to the pile of neutrality and indifferentiation?
Destruction and Survival
Once again, the arts provide an interesting case in point. How many artists do not – in defence of their work and to promote its discursive communicability – present themselves by means of the stigmata of their fascination? How many do not try, in doing that, to invoke some sort of formulaic evidence of the passionate experience they have ‘authentically’ been living through, while at the same time reducing the uniqueness they want to express through it to an ‘object’ that makes no difference, since it can be ‘whatever’? Anything can be fascinating. Everyone is already fascinated. To be fascinated is truly, as Baudrillard claimed, “our general situation”. Yet, what is lost then in losing it? What is, so to speak, not surviving in surviving fascination?
At first sight this seems a melancholic question, a question that seems to be born out of a mourning for the lost aura or presence of the fascinating image, being now objectified. In reality, however, it probes for the unendurable experience of radical absence, in which subject and object are said to nearly disappear in fascination, as passion for the image. For if it is true that we constantly try to objectify and re-present our fascination as a means to remain present and to maintain our ability to give meaning in a cultural age that dooms us to be “melancholic and fascinated”, then the question as to how to stay in Pleasure would be contemptible would it not also be this appalling surpassing of limits ... Being is given to us in an unbearable surpassing of being, no less unbearable than death. But since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same time that it is given, we must search for it in the feeling of death, in those unbearable moments when, no longer being within us except through an excess of being, it seems that we are dying, and the fullness of our horror coincides with the fullness of our joy.
touch with the radical absence underlying it is simply vital. After all, in asking how to deal with the excessive distance that holds us in its grip and in which we risk to vanish while having an experience of fascination, we also touch uponitscritical potential to ‘distance’ us from ourselves and the world ‘as it is’.
The reason for this is that the radical absence we experience in the fascinating image is no mere negativity. It refers to a zone of indeterminacy that precedes all things determinate: an “unlimited depth,” as Blanchot called it, “where objects sink when they become separated from their meaning, when they subside into their image,” and which is essentially ambivalent, an utterly obscure “light that is also the abyss, horrifying and alluring, light in which we sink” (413). In other words, the absence at stake in the experience of fascination is not merely the absence of the thing (or the object), which is in traditional analysis the condition for the appearance of the image. Yet it is the appearance of a more elementary absence in the heart of the thing itself, the imaginary return of a radical split in (or an excessive distance toward) itself. Usually this fundamental ambivalence in the thing’s being is overcome by perceiving (and therefore mastering) it objectively. In the event of fascination, however, the experience of the image is precisely signalling the return of this groundlessness. As a result, our ability to stay in touch with this image without rendering it to objectification, is directly proportional to our potency to endure a fundamental indeterminacy at the core of what is, an otherness that haunts its identity. And however unendurable that is, it is therefore linked to our possibility to surpass ourselves, or to surpass ‘being’, without giving ourselves over to death and oceanic indifference. In short, it is vital for our capacity at ‘metamorphosis’, in other words: at survival by becoming other.
Yet what does this really take? What does it take to not only survive one’s fascination but to have this fascination surviving itself, too? Is this possible given the human impulse to objectify the absence (of object) when we feel that under the spell of a fascinating image depersonalization looms? Oristhe impossibility to avoid objectification in fact its possibility? Maybe the word ‘art’ refers to this (im)possibility, tying fascination to metamorphosis, or an experience of the (subjectively) unbearable to what is nevertheless (and objectively) born. Yet since today’s artistic discourse is governed by an imperative that prioritizes the imaginary experience of fascination while at the same time reducing it to whatever object, one actually needs to surpass it in order to grasp how the mutually exclusive coincidence of surviving one’s fascination and to have one’s fascination survive can be realized in art at all. As a matter of fact, contrary to today’s overall cliché that an artist is someone who is able to communicate his personal fascination, as if it is exactly by locating it into a particular object that he maintains an unmediated and authentic connection with the image he is fascinated by, I would like to propose that the metamorphosis by means of which one’s fascination survives canonlyoccurvia the inevitable mediation of a personal object that neutralizes the fascination as a source of depersonalisation. Under the condition, however, that this object itself gets destroyed.
In his great book on transitional objects, Playing and Reality (1971), Donald Winnicott makes a fundamental suggestion along these lines. Dealing with the distinction between “the use of an object and relating through identifications”, as the sixth chapter is titled (115-127),Winnicottelucidateswhat it takes for a subject to move away from self-containment and “relating to subjective objects” via “cathexis” (“Besetzung”) into the realm of “object-usage”, which implies that the object is “a thing on itself,”
independently existing and characterized by “having been there all the time” (118-119). In other words, Winnicott attempts to clarify what is needed to successfully go through the difficult transition from the condition in which the isolated subject experiences reality as “a bundle of projections” (118) to the mature situation in which it takes part in shared reality through its ability to use the object. Remarkably enough, however, he claims that this transition can only succeed by virtue of the subject’s (developed) capacity to destroy the subjective objects it has created. After reminding us how “the paradox and the acceptance of the paradox” (119) is an essential feature of transitional objects and phenomena (i.e. in clinical terms: “the baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created and to become a cathected object” [119]), Winnicott states:
To use an object the subject must have developed a capacity to use objects. This is part of the change to the reality principle. … In the sequence one can say that first there is object-relating, then in the end there is object-use; in between, however, is the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development ... This thing that there is in between relating and use is the subject’s placing outside the area of the subject’s omnipotent control, that is: the subject’s perception of the object as an external phenomenon, not as a projective entity, in fact recognition of it as an entity in its own right. This change (from relating to usage) means that the subject destroys the object. From here it could be argued by an armchair philosopher that there is therefore no such thing in practice as the use of an object: if the object is external, then the object is destroyed by the subject. Should the philosopher come out of his chair …, however, he will find that there is an intermediate position. In other words, he will find that after ‘subject relates to object’ comes ‘subject destroys object’ (as it becomes external); and then may come ‘object survives destruction by the subject’. But there may or may not be survival. (119-120)
A parallel process is taking place in the artistic transition from fascination to communication, I think, at least if this communication wishes for the survival of the fascination it is driven by. We have seen that the depersonalizing and therefore unbearable experience of radical absence to which one is exposed while being fascinated is simply forcing one to replace the image at the core of one’s fascination by an object one is able to carry on with. The creation of thisobject is a matter of survival, yet being the result of an act of objectification its significance is restricted to what it is meant to be (or to do) for the fascinated person: a recovery of its ability to give meaning or to regain mastery over radical absence like it is experienced in fascination. Thus, the object that results out of a person’s objectifying attempt at surviving a fascination is merely an issue of (what Winnicott calls) “object-relating”.Infact, it is exactly in this sense – having a personal object of fascination – that our culture’s constant demand ‘to be fascinated’ is commonly answered. As such, these objects of fascination are meant to make a difference. In reality, however, their overall display merely adds up to “the precession of the neutral” and the indifferent by which our culture is already governed. Since these objects do not belong to a shared reality but only to the sole reality of projection and identification in the person itself, the only thing these subjective objects really share is the personal logic they separately serve. Consequently, aswe havealready said, the personal – being expressed through its fascination – grows synonymous with the neutral. And to claim ‘to be fascinated’ becomes rather a sign of self-indulgence than of the
depersonalizing event it wants to evoke.
To exploit one’s fascination in this way, however, is not the same as to really ‘use’ it. In order to use it, one needs to destroy it. That is: one needs to destroy it as a personal object. Not out of a regressive melancholy for the unique and true contact with the image that is lost, but so as to put it outside the subject’s omnipotent control and realize its autonomy as a thing in itself. In short, it is only through the destruction of the personal object by which the subject survives fascination that the experience of fascination might itself survive in the artistic work, as part of a shared or inter-subjective reality. What we usually call the work of art is precisely thisworkofdestruction,leading up to the construction of something (a book, a painting...) that often still lookslike apersonalobject but in whichthepersonalis ‘used’ in an impersonal way. Justlikeanobject’sexternalrealitymakesfortheworldofdifferencebetween relatingandusage, itistheemergenceofanimpersonalobject(out of the destruction of the artist’s personal object inthecreationofhis work) which makesfor the metamorphosis by which fascination survives.
In fact, we have known this since Homer’s third-person narrative on Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens. What we can better understand by now is how this object’s impersonality isnotonly an echo of the fascinated subject’s imaginary experience of near depersonalization, but also the source of a fundamental indeterminacy that makes an appeal to the imagination, as Wolfgang Iser would have put it (1970), of whoever comes after the work of destroying the artist’s personal object has been done, i.e. in case his fascination has survived. Eventually, thoughitremainsunsure whetherthepersonalobject will survive the artist’s destruction or not, itisthestartoffantasyas the result of destruction which turns fascination into communication. Forif the object survives the destruction, the subject says to it:
‘Hullo object!’ ‘I destroyed you.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.’ ‘While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious)
fantasy.’ Here fantasy begins for the individual. The subject can now use the object that has
survived. (Winnicott 120-121) Conclusion
Reading the latter quote, it is actually hard not to be reminded of Petry’s De Maagd Marino. In an attempt to sublimate a recurring phantasm whose object revolves around its (protagonist’s) fascination for individuals with an unbearable lack of individuality, as if they were the spitting image of the cosmic void in whose musicality Petry’s protagonists have always looked for consolation, the novelcreates an imaginative account which, in a spiral movement, stylises this very object into a fascinating subject. Put differently, the novel actually destroys Petry’s personal object of fascination, as it can be seen in his former novels, by bringing it explicitly to the fore (of the story) and relating it implicitly to external reality (the cannibal of Rothenburg). As a result, it is made ready for ‘use’, i.e. as the very subject of a story that can only realize the communication of itsfascination(orcanonlymake itsurvive) through its appeal to the imagination of the reader.
A man who has made himself the personal object of another’s dehumanizing fascination survives this self-afflicted destruction by speaking through the mouth of his imprisoned killer. Consequently, he
ends up being the real subject of a first-person-story he cannot possibly tell, realistically speaking, about his meeting with the subject after which the very novel is named, Marino, who suffers from a lack of ‘I’ and has therefore enriched himself by incorporating him. Since the unbearable literalness of the latter act implies that the story is a third-person-account after all, be it that the reader is deluded by an imaginary voice and an impossible perspective, it becomes clear that Marino has only survived his depersonalizing fascination through becoming fundamentally other, that is: by virtue of his capacity at metamorphosis. Of course, one can say that this is only true in the imagination. Even worse, the imagination is driven to insanity. From a realistic perspective, though, one can also see that the object of Marino’s fascination has grown autonomous, as a result of its destruction. Put simply, it has gained a life of its own.
The point of all this is not the complexity of the paradox nor our difficulty to accept it. The point is that the impersonal object which emerges out of the personal object’s destruction isreadyfor use, because of its survival. In Petry’s novel this results above all in a rage against the fiction of the ‘free individual’ as it is simultaneously loudly promoted and utterly degraded in late capitalist society:
City air makes you free? Don’t make me laugh. It is the narrow-minded ghost of identity that rules here, not the delicate spirit of singularity. The city was the necropolis in which the individual was buried alive.And if the individual no longer felt this to be so, that was simply since it had finally suffocated, or had never existed. (200)
Generally speaking, however, I think such a use of one’s surviving fascination re-establishes fascination asacriticalpower. Ratherthan allowingus to be entirely absorbed by an image, it alerts us to the ‘fascinating’ appearance of reality we are entirely absorbed into, restoring its ambivalence. For as Ackbar Abbas writes, in discussing Walter Benjamin’s use of fascination for critique: “If fascination has a certain ambivalence, it is the ambivalence of the mask that doubles as a gas-mask, a critical apparatus that allows one to breathe in an inhospitable atmosphere. It allows one to work through the social tensions of the age” (52). In sum, if fascination is indeedpartofour generalcondition,to ‘use’ it, in the destructive senseIhave tried to describe, isameansto go so deeply into it that one touches upon aborder,a limit we call the imaginary, from where the work of liberating ourselves from this fascinating condition can finally begin.
Works Cited
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Petry, Yves. De maagd Marino. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 2010.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Etre et le Néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Van Imschoot, Tom. “Wat bezielt de literatuur? Over de romans van Yves Petry”. Ons erfdeel 55.3
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Winnicott, Donald. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971.
Tom Van Imschoot teaches literature, cultural theory and writing at LUCA – School of Arts Ghent/KU Leuven Association. In 2006, he obtained a PhD at Ghent University with a dissertation on Wolfgang Iser, Maurice Blanchot and the Flemish author Louis Paul Boon, regarding the interaction between reading and the imaginary. He is a founding editor of the cultural magazine rekto:verso (www.rektoverso.be) and publishes both criticism and essays on culture, literature and art. He also works as a playwright and a dramaturge.
