Into the darkness. A trip through Virtual Spaces

Into the darkness. A trip through Virtual Spaces

Then he moved on, and I behind him followed.
Dante, The Divine Comedy

The Blind Guide

There are some terrains that should not be visited without a guide. For many psychoanalysts, Freud takes on the role of a guide. Today I want to propose a different sort of guide, one that leads me through a terrain that at moments seems like Hell, a Hell in permanent mutation, that of virtual spaces. For someone like me, a member of Generation X who functions in a digital world without having been born in a digital era, a guide could be a youth trained to use the latest technology, a millennial. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to see young people teaching adults.

As Virgil led Dante, Borges, the most universal writer of my native land, will lead me through the hells and paradises of our contemporary virtualization. Borges was born in Buenos Aires at the time Freud was writing his books on dream interpretation here…

It seems difficult to believe that a blind 80-year-old poet who wrote by hand or dictation, and who dreamed of a world of bandits and tango singers, Bengal tigers, never-ending mirrors and labyrinths, could possibly know the world we want to explore here.

But then again, if you think about the richness of Argentina and of its people, it is also difficult to believe that we could always be in a state of underdevelopment. Perhaps you think that we somehow manage. After all, a Pope, a Queen and the best soccer player in the world have come out of Argentina; and Borges too; and the greatest density of psychoanalysts per square meter in the world.

The choice of our Virgil is not so unbelievable if we consider two things: One is his blindness. And since psychoanalysis stems from the epistemological shift that replaced the Gaze in curing ailments of the soul for that of Listening, we are on solid ground.

As a guide, Borges is anachronic; as anachronic as Freud or psychoanalysis itself. Far from being a defect announcing its uselessness, anachronism is the very key to psychoanalysis’ efficacy.

Borges predicted the future we live now : the virtual spaces. He could do this because he went against the tide, against any contemporary ambition. He saw the future because he didn’t care about predicting it; his foreignness -isomorphic to that of the psychoanalyst- was necessary for his finely-tuned ability to listen.

If science hadn’t ceased to be a way of telling stories , psychoanalysis probably would have never existed. This scientific discourse wouldn’t have excluded the subject or his experience. Here is our science of singularity, weak in pure scientific terms, but unrivaled when considering the human discontent. Psychoanalysis is -as Pierre Legendre said- almost an accident of scientific thought.

Borges wouldn’t disapprove of this definition.

An Imaginary Hell

Remember when Virgil led Dante through Hell, that funnel-like space where sinners burned for an eternity. As they descended from one concentric circle to another, the graveness of sins and the lack of space they were condemned to live in, increased. For those interested in the role of space in mental configuration, this fact is critical. As Geographies of Psychoanalysis proposes, depriving ourselves of space can be a curse.

By Virgil’s hand, Dante witnessed the eternal torments endured by the lustful, the greedy, the avaricious and the prodigal, the angry and the lazy, the heretics, the violent, the frauds and the traitors. Our Hell will be that of the virtual space, technology has superimposed, like a new map on the mind’s landscape and the relationships that analysts have explored for the past century.

The first circle of our Hell is the most superficial and an entrance into the rest: the web. It’s difficult to imagine our existence without it, although a few decades ago it didn’t exist. We are far from understanding the consequences of the appearance and installation of the internet as an omnipresent virtual net. One of its essential characteristics, seemingly opposite to our normal behavior, is its affinity with the surface.

When Baricco talks about the surface and analyzes the phenomenon of contemporary mutations , he describes his barbarians, the millennials, as surface animals. Depth is foreign to this generation, as is psychoanalysis, or the so-called depth psychology. But these mutant youths navigate amazingly on the surface, gaining in velocity what they lose in depth, and the map they build extends like water on a flat surface which offers no resistance. Within this terrain, we should somehow make a space for psychoanalysis and the experience we propose to our patients. However, it is not always that easy.

Borges imagined this web in a way in The Library of Babel when he imagined the universe as a complete and infinite library.

There are many circles due to the existence of the web. From a psychoanalyst’s point of view, some are more monstrous than others. Perhaps one of the most interesting of the contemporary phenomena is Wikipedia, which invites users to interact and participate. Although one could criticize it, this formidable collaborative encyclopedia is essential. Borges also saw it in Tlön Uqbar Orbius Tertius, the marvellous story of a collectively-imagined world superimposed on yet another imaginary world.

One key characteristic to understanding the effectiveness of the web is hypertext, connected to link, and which made possible the development of a tool central to navigating the web, that of the Google search engine. Its own name has been converted to a generic one: if Hell is Dantesque, the unconscious Freudian, “to search the web” is to google it.

One century ago, a text configured as hypertext, as they are on the web, would be a nuisance for readers, disturbing the line of argument or story. But thought functions the same way. As analysts, we know how each word is able to function like a switch at a railway junction, leading one to different destinies that later take on a meaning which is always new. The talking in analysis, free association, and its counterpart- free-floating attention-is a method that is perhaps more akin to the structure of thinking.
The analytic method would be hyper-textual, avant la lettre.

Borges predicted hypertext in his short-story The Garden of Forking Paths .

One might think that there is nothing sinful about these contemporary characteristics of the relationships we have among us, through technology. However, they are the condition, and for this reason I have placed them on the surface of the Hell I am exploring, in which the ego – that precarious yet self-sufficient instance that psychoanalysis has studied so much- expands with the register that is most similar to it, the imaginary. Let’s go further down.

I won’t stop to question the superficiality with which we use a variety of terms in the most popular social network, Facebook. We all know that friends, share and like have nothing to do with their actual counterparts. What I am interested in is how each person presents himself there, where from the beginning, from his own name, the priviledged dimension of the image is included.

Everyone creates a profile, a public ego, imaginary, fictitious in the worst way, a construction: smiling images of friends, travelling the world, deciding what belongings and references to show. In this circle of hell, millions of FB users transmit versions of themselves in the way they would like to be seen. In no way is there a relationship to how they really see themselves, and here perhaps the neurosis has mutated: to have fewer than 200 friends could be a catastrophe for many…

FB is an exercise in self-fiction and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it is the opposite of what we try to achieve in analysis: to distance ourselves from the image that represents us, one that is more often than not, coerced by some Ideal, and the mistrust generated from that pretended self-sufficiency one offers up to others.

As we descend further into Hell, the devotion to images is even more extensive. So much so, that there seems to be little space, not even virtual, available to accommodate such a legion of sinners.

Although FB provides space for more and more images, this is potentiated even moreso in Youtube. This network outdoes FB with the slogan: Broadcast yourself.

A curious phenomenon occurs there: more and more young people listen to music through this network where the visual is predominant, and not because there aren’t other networks, such as Spotify. You cannot dispense with what is seen even when listening. What you hear, without images that accompany it, seems to suffer from some disability.

Another circle of hell through which Borges guides us, is that of the Instagram users. From its beginning, images have taken the leading role. Anyone who has contact with young people knows the place Instagram occupies in their exchanges. We are always late: we learned to use email when it was already outdated for them. Later, we get up the nerve to create a profile on FB only to realize that it had already been displaced by other networks. We had familiarized ourselves with SMS, simple text messages, when WhatsApp appeared, announcing that we still belong to the universe of digital illiterates; we are always lagging behind the next generation. There is a certain delay- the delay of words in relation to images- which seems inseparable from the figure of the psychoanalyst.

In some way, psychoanalysts are powerless against a culture that is transmitted largely through images. For us, the images do not have the same status and we tend to think that a culture that prefers the image devalues the precious power of words.

The discipline of Looking isn’t foreign to the psychoanalyst, but the discovery of the unconscious as well as the invention of the analytical atmosphere, happened a posteriori and overthrew the culture of the image. Hysteria was treated according to the medical perspective, as shown in the Charcotean theatre of La Salpètriere. It wouldn’t be strange to imagine all that iconography by the photographer of hysteria, as Charcot liked to identify himself- populating Instagram accounts, if they had existed …

Without leaving the circle of Instagramers, we come to another even deeper circle, the Snapchat users. Its fundamental characteristic is its instantaneity. Here, photos are exchanged: the pictures are only displayed on the screen of the receiver fleetingly, for seconds.

Borges also imagined this when he invented the fictitious book of sand, of infinite pages, with arbitrary numbering and permanent change, like sand, and neither has a beginning nor an end. Every teenager who sends a photo to his friends repeats the gesture of the story character who offers the book to the narrator, proposing that he look at the illustration of a small anchor.

Look well—he says. It shall not be seen again.

After which the narrator, upon closing the book, immediately opens it again, to search in vain for the image that had disappeared from its pages .

I wonder if room is made for listening in this hellish world of images; how can we dig a hole in images that appear always complete, full, absolute. Listening requires time while the image offers instantaneity. In this part of Hell no one waits, a satisfactory image never arrives, a bulimia of images calls for more and more, you are never satisfied.

Borges always toyed with the idea of having a double, as when he writes:

Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in the other. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things .

Something like this happens in the deepest circle of Hell, almost a logical consequence of the above.

Never before have we seen such powerful interfaces and such real simulations, where a large mass of people decide that a second life on the web is more interesting than the first one. That’s what many of those decide when they subscribe to a virtual world called Second Life, which has more inhabitants -called residents- than my own country.

A Second Life user builds his avatar with the illusion of self-procreation, founds his business, buys properties, chooses a sexual partner, visits the psychoanalyst… Reality becomes the place of dreams and it is in the virtual universe where relationships, desires and rivalries unfold; where you have a “real” virtual life. If we could consider real, the life of the protagonist of The Truman Show or the millions of human creatures cultivated by machines such as Neo before being awakened by Morpheus in The Matrix.

Here we find that it is unnecessary to undo the distortions that the dreamwork imposes, since phantasies appear all around. Second Life is about an ideal life. The avatars are usually young and beautiful, like the substitutes in the film Surrogates or the beauty of the operating system embodied by Scarlett Johansson’s voice in Her.

What the users of Second Life teach us does not have to do with the delicate Freudian counterpoint between the historical reality and the material one, or the way each one captures reality through his phantasy. It is not even a self-fiction about a narcissistic ego shaping its experiences with a false autonomy. Nor is it one of those subtle games in which Borges imagines another Borges, and through which he could grasp the identifying complexities of subjectivity. It is something else: someone drops out of the world order, symbolic and also real, to carry out an imagined life as if one were a video game´s character.

Here, the Freudian formula that proposed to change neurotic misery into ordinary misfortune -the analytic offer and bet- seems powerless against those who choose to become citizens of an imaginary country rather than being responsible citizens of their own desires, in an unfortunate -though real- First Life.

Nobody seems to wake up from this dream superimposed on the reality that Borges, once again, glimpsed at in The Circular Ruins. The last sentences of his story could well be the story of an analytic session where a patient finally becomes aware of his subjection by the Other:

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him .

Having chosen Borges to explore this Hell does not mean that everything is prefigured and there is nothing new under the sun. But Borges, who was not enthusiastic of psychoanalysis, appears here as a proto-analyst.

Through anachronism and blindness, Borges saw beyond and could guess much of what is happening today.

Anachronism, a time-shifter, provides the necessary distance in order to see the present; it is like a healthy estrangement that allows us to think about ourselves.

Blindness is another matter; it’s not a bad idea to imagine the psychoanalyst as a myopic animal.

Listening and Gazing

Imagine a storm. Lightning lights up the night, and then a few seconds later, you hear thunder. That scene, common to everyone, reveals how two manifestations emerge from a single event, one visual, the other auditory. The visual is instantaneous, multiple, protean. The auditory, however, is more difficult to capture, is delayed in perception and dissipates to the point of inaudibility. The speed of light -900,000 times greater than the speed of sound- gives priority to the visual. We see more easily than we hear.

Time is a key factor here. While the visual experience is instantaneous, the auditory experience requires a temporal unfolding to be appreciated. So, it is easier to see than to hear. For this reason psychoanalysis requires a considerable amount of time compared to the immediacy that prevails in hell’s circles. Furthermore, listening captures something that is lost in seeing.

In cinema, that which is seen predominates over that which is heard, but the sound recording and what happens offscreen is central. The filmmaker Bresson knew well when he said that the eye is superficial; the ear is deep and inventive. Whereas the eye goes outward, the ear goes inward . Audition is also the more predominant sense in poetry. As D.H. Lawrence said: ears go deeper than eyes can see.

The pre-Socratic philosophers intuited this when they gave their lectures behind heavy curtains. The words took on a different value when their bodies were invisible to their students, and the spoken words were extracted from the immediate visual surroundings. The acousmatic experience is recovered in the analytic atmosphere where the analyst is located outside of the patient’s visual field to privilege the register of the voice.

Foucault studied how the medical model is set within the epistemological space of the Gaze , as it is shown in the charcotean theatre of hysteria or in the simple etimology of the auscultation instrument. There the clinician—as part of his research—hears bodily sounds through a simple apparatus, the stethoscope. This word comes from stetos, thorax, and scopia, to look. Although he appears to be listening, the clinician is looking.

The psychoanalyst, on the other hand, blinds himself voluntarily. And like every blind person, he develops other senses vicariously, mostly hearing. Though he seems to be looking, the psychoanalyst is listening .

Psychoanalysis is a place where one speaks and where one is heard. If you think about it, it isn’t common to find places where one talks, and fewer still are the places where one is heard.

The Anachronic Sound of Vinyl

If Hell is the place where images spread like metastasis…is Paradise a place where you listen?

We could think of psychoanalysis’ place in the virtual hyper-technological world that we talk about, using a figure that many of you surely recognize, and it has to do with sound support. Let’s look at another trait of Borges that makes him the perfect guide.

Psychoanalysis unfolds within the dimension of sound, the material we use in our practice are both the heard and spoken words. Although other senses are present, they work together to give coherency within the field of Listening. It is here where psychoanalysis clearly sets itself apart from the Medical Gaze.

Sound recordings have changed dramatically over time, like so many other things in our lives. Technological evolution is dizzying and music lovers who a few decades ago listened to vinyl records on a phonograph or record player already have problems getting hold of these traditional formats today.

We are currently witnessing a strange phenomenon: the revival of old vinyl records. Not only do we see a return to the production of vinyl records but we also see new designs that are fragile, impractical in size, possessing a limited capacity, and which have wonderful cover designs. Vinyl records have considerable value, and they are a luxury compared to the almost zero cost of some bits of information placed in an iPod.

It is worth asking why and who would pay for that anachronically, impractical and expensive way to store and listen to music. Anyone who has heard a vinyl record knows why. The anachronism of listening to music this way allows us to recover a certain mystery that the digital world annihilates. The same happens when we examine digital and analogue photography. We find that digital recordings flatten the sound; by compressing it, nuances are lost and may be heard again only with vinyl records. The crackling noise of the record needle can be annoying for many but for others, it adds a wonderful aura. The crackling noise recovers what the image hides so that the music may be heard another way.

The same applies to analysis. So-called progress has developed molecules able to modify or suppress anxiety, improve mood, annihilate hallucinations, silence delusions, without a doubt. Progress has also been reported –perhaps less clearly- in the field of non-psychoanalytic psychotherapies. It would be foolish to oppose these therapies, just as it would be foolish to refuse to listen to music on the cell phone or watch movies on Netflix.

But our task, though difficult to accept, goes against the grain. It is anachronistic by structure, if we understand anachronism the way Agamben did , and by doing so shine light on the present. It is an analogue islet—a divan is an analogue artifact in a virtual world. Without electrical power, we can’t turn on the computer or activate any social network. However, you can still continue talking and listening.

As it is necessary to understand how a person is virtualized, is dislocated and made more complex, it is also necessary to accept that our practice goes against the tide, even though we use Skype, have a profile on Facebook, or google terms or authors that interest us . Although we see conferences on Youtube and write texts such as the one I am reading now from a laptop, psychoanalysis is by necessity, against the tide.

And it always was, even when it seemed to be a fad. Only when we go against the tide can we hear some things like the crackling noise of the needle on an old vinyl record, a remnant as anachronic and mysterious as the words with which psychoanalysis is accustomed to work.

A Night in the Museum

I like to think of each conference as being located in a place. And this place has a lot of meaning for me.

I was here thirty years ago, when I didn’t know I was going to become a psychoanalyst. I came with a close friend of mine who died just after our trip. His death had a lot to do with my decision to become a psychoanalyst and the fact that I am here today.

I am here also because of Felix de Mendelsohn. Both have been guides in a way: Into the lightness.

This place is usually empty. The furniture and objects of Freud and his family are in London, in the other Freud Museum. Stripped of objects, this place is what it is.

The idea of place as emptiness is central for a project like Geographies. Unlike Hell, space is made for what is missing here, which is precisely what remains hidden in virtual spaces.

This museum is more real than the one in London, where Freud lived for only a few months. It was here that Freud heard stories allowing him to develop psychoanalysis.

The truth shown here is that of the Catastrophe, the disaster brought about by Nazism. In this sense it is a lieu de memoire . The emptiness that remains is a testament to that Hell, that open wound.

Memory and emptiness also belong to Felix, who dreamed of this gathering, and whose absence marks everything that we have been able to say.

The caretakers of the museum have wisely included an interlocution among contemporary artists , experts of emptiness. So, I would like to finish by showing some works of a contemporary Latin American artist. In this place, so European, images of where psychoanalysis has settled with unusual force will be seen for a fleeting moment- as in Snapchat.

The photographs belong to Luis González Palma, one of the most important Latin American photographers. His work, as anachronic as that of Borges or Freud, is a sort of Treaty on the Gaze, and the effect of a fertile dialogue with psychoanalysis can be felt.

At this point, the analyst opens his eyes and without ceasing to listen, gazes.