KRITIKK AV UTSTILLINGEN,
AV ARNE SKAUG OLSEN
The central conceit of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1937 novel “Nausea,” involves its protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, peculiar relationship with the external world and the things residing there, which, for Roquentin, have come to be characterized by a malevolent disassociation of their thingness, their istigkeit, from linguistic signification itself. In one scene, Roquentin’s visit to a neighborhood café turns into a nightmare of visual over-saturation precipitated by the barman’s purple suspenders: “The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.”
Clearly, Roquentin is undergoing an experience characteristic of schizophrenia, which is in essence a disease of language and signification described by Frederic Jameson as a “break-down of the relationship between signifiers.” The inability to fabricate and maintain interiority and exteriority, normally the job of language, leads to spatio-temporal collapse, a confusing of inside and outside, often accompanied by a sense of persecution or grandiose fantasies of omnipotence. Yet, from a distance of more than seventy years, Sartre’s novel and the world-view it implies seems reassuring in its faith in a physical world that is somehow, given some effort, within our reach. Kjersti Vetterstad’s new work, Lethargia, seems to ask what happens when this reassuring verisimilitude is replaced by a bottomless vertiguity. Another way of phrasing the question is to ask what happens to human subjectivity in a world where the most extreme of postmodern fantasists—Jean Baudrillard chief among them—have been proved right. In a world in which the fashion advertisement is more alluring than the person depicted, the pornographic image more erotically charged than the sexual act itself, the filmic narrative more real than the narratives we ourselves create through living, virtual communication more common than face-to-face encounters, it is as if we cede more and more power to objects, as if “things themselves have transgressed their own limit.”
This condition, which the Situationists long ago diagnosed as symptomatic of consumer capital, and which Deleuze and Guattari identified as in itself schizogenic, becomes more apparent with each passing year. If we were to reformulate the thinking of these French intellectuals in the guise of a species of second-rate science fiction speculation, we might describe capital as a virus capable of penetrating our cognitive boundaries, turning subject-object relations inside out. One might characterize the resulting human subject as a bricolleur assembling identity out of the flotsam and jetsam of media. Vetterstad has diagnosed the condition, creating a kind of Situationist sci-fi noir film where the inherent visuality of the Spectacle has been suppressed and its banality foregrounded; a world where everything is black except the subtitles. Thus we are free to project our own dis-simulations onto a pastiche of cult Hollywood films, documentaries, soap operas, and anonymous horror pabulum. Here dream logic is regnant, yet what is remarkable is how the fantasies Vetterstad articulates appear banal. This banality underscores how much electronic media (and consumer society) feeds on infantile fantasies of omnipotence—the type which can abide destruction more than sublimation or deferral. Hence, borrowing from Baudrillard, this is “a fatal vision of the banal.” And in our contemporary world banality has grown prodigious.
This is not simply a postmodern worldview but a postmodern eschatology, or a postmodern epidemiology if you will, for disease has both an etiology and an outcome. . If we suppose that the collapse between interiority and exteriority from which Sartre’s hero Roquentin suffered has, under commodity capital, mutated into something far more pernicious, we can expect its symptoms to be correspondingly more severe. So she doesn’t need to allude directly to the external phenomenon that make our world an increasingly disturbing place, because for the composite characters inhabiting her monochrome world, these phenomenon already prevail, and further, have produced a corresponding psychopathology. But Vetterstad has not produced a diagnosis in which she mistakes symptom for disease so much as let the symptom speak for itself. And speak it does.
This condition, which the Situationists long ago diagnosed as symptomatic of consumer capital, and which Deleuze and Guattari identified as in itself schizogenic, becomes more apparent with each passing year. If we were to reformulate the thinking of these French intellectuals in the guise of a species of second-rate science fiction speculation, we might describe capital as a virus capable of penetrating our cognitive boundaries, turning subject-object relations inside out. One might characterize the resulting human subject as a bricolleur assembling identity out of the flotsam and jetsam of media. Vetterstad has diagnosed the condition, creating a kind of Situationist sci-fi noir film where the inherent visuality of the Spectacle has been suppressed and its banality foregrounded; a world where everything is black except the subtitles. Thus we are free to project our own dis-simulations onto a pastiche of cult Hollywood films, documentaries, soap operas, and anonymous horror pabulum. Here dream logic is regnant, yet what is remarkable is how the fantasies Vetterstad articulates appear banal. This banality underscores how much electronic media (and consumer society) feeds on infantile fantasies of omnipotence—the type which can abide destruction more than sublimation or deferral. Hence, borrowing from Baudrillard, this is “a fatal vision of the banal.” And in our contemporary world banality has grown prodigious.
This is not simply a postmodern worldview but a postmodern eschatology, or a postmodern epidemiology if you will, for disease has both an etiology and an outcome. . If we suppose that the collapse between interiority and exteriority from which Sartre’s hero Roquentin suffered has, under commodity capital, mutated into something far more pernicious, we can expect its symptoms to be correspondingly more severe. So she doesn’t need to allude directly to the external phenomenon that make our world an increasingly disturbing place, because for the composite characters inhabiting her monochrome world, these phenomenon already prevail, and further, have produced a corresponding psychopathology. But Vetterstad has not produced a diagnosis in which she mistakes symptom for disease so much as let the symptom speak for itself. And speak it does.
/ Michael Baers--
