Sándor Ferenczi’s Thalassa, written in 1924 but based on ideas dating from 1915–1920,1 is really a very peculiar book, described by the author himself as the result of a strictly inadmissible synthesis of ‘natural science and mental science’.2 Its subtitle positions it as ‘A Theory of Genitality’—that is, it presents an alternative account to Freud’s own of how polymorphic, disorganised libidinal drives become invested in the genital organs and thus aligned with the exigencies of organic reproduction. How do unformed blind inorganic forces disposed to perversity become integrated into and harnessed for the interests of the organism? What kind of libidinal investments and psychic processes correspond to this process of maturation? Freud’s 1905 Three Essays gave an account of this process, whose ineluctable completion will ultimately ensure the dominance of the ‘end-pleasure’ act of coitus—the ‘definite normal form’ of sexuality, the ‘new order of things’ in which ‘[t]he sexual impulse now enters into the service of the function of propagation’. This is both the end of the path of sexual development and the successful delivery of the adult from diverse and perverse ‘forepleasures’ to the reflex act of coitus. In short it is a question of how psychic life adapts itself to organic life, rebinding contingent pleasures to healthy organic function (a process interruptions of which psychoanalysis aims to correct).
Ferenczi’s primary innovation in Thalassa is to extend this analysis to the peculiar character of the act of copulation. This is an entertainingly bizarre project in itself, but has a bearing on speculative aesthetics through the theory of symbolism that emerges along the way.
In its first stage Ferenczi’s analysis supplements Freud’s account of sexual development with the observation that the sexual act itself seems to comprise a combination of the ‘evacuatory and inhibitory’ (‘urethral’ and ‘anal’): the act itself expresses an indecision between these two basic tendencies, and, as Ferenczi hears from his patients, failure to successfully resolve their duality results in ‘a kind of genital stuttering’ (ejaculation praecox or ejaculation retardata). This amphimixis of erotisms, existing already in pregenital organization as the mutual adaptation of hedonism and renunciation, furnishes the clue for understanding the process of the ‘establishing of genital primacy’. With the latter, warring instinct-components are amphimictically subsumed under an ‘executive manager’ responsible for periodically discharging tension ‘on behalf of the whole organism’; meaning that the phallus, also, becomes a representative of the ego.3
Guided by dream symbolism, Ferenczi reads sexual development in terms of the postulation of a ‘continuous regressive trend toward the reestablishment of the intrauterine situation’—the famous ‘back to the womb’ theory.4 Whereas the reality principle, of course, is only attained in renouncing such desires, Ferenczi insists on an ‘erotic reality sense’ that consists in its hallucinatory fulfilment. There is a threefold identification and gratification at stake in this fulfilment which involves a kind of relay between levels: as the sexual secretion closes the biological circle of reproduction, actually ‘returning’ to the womb, the genital organ—invested as a synecdoche for the organism as a whole—physically discharges the tension of the body; and the whole psyche, with the organism having appointed the genital as the executive agent to drain off its stress, in a hallucinatory way returns, in fantasy, to a harmonious prenatal state of rest.
Ferenczi’s claim that perigenesis recapitulates phylogeny (that the prenatal environment of the individual preserves the postnatal environment of its evolutionary forebears) is obviously a variant of the notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (that, in the maturation of any individual of the species, we find compacted all of the stages of its evolutionary development). There can be few theories more comprehensively refuted by twentieth-century advances in biology than this notion, Ernst Haeckel’s ‘recapitulation theory’ or ‘biogenetic law’, routinely denounced as a product of pseudomorphism and wishful (and sometimes downright contradictory) thinking. In Stephen Jay Gould’s encyclopaedic historical survey of the origins, uses and misuses of recapitulation theory, Thalassa, ‘the boldest application of psychoanalysis that was ever attempted’ according to Freud, trumps even the latter’s lifelong devotion to Haeckel’s biogenetic law and its flowering in his late speculative works.5 Although relatively harmless compared to some of the dubious political causes into which recapitulationism was pressed, Thalassa’s egregious psychoanalytical fantasia holds pride of place for raising the theory to absurd speculative heights.
And indeed Ferenczi now goes further with the theme of amphimixis, connecting the frictional movements of coitus with ‘autotomy’—the mechanism by which certain animals can simply detach parts of their body, as a lizard leaves its tail behind when pursued. Phylogenetically, he argues, anal-urethral amphimixis can be traced back to a more fundamental conflict between a desire to physically detach (in order to cast off ‘unpleasure’) and a desire to retain organic unity—a kind of archetypal itching. Erection is incomplete autotomy, a ‘striving to extrude’ the unpleasure of tension from the body, enacted ludically in coitus and cut short by the vicarious ‘detachment’ of the sexual secretion.
This is not even like the old crude joke among men, apropos of l’origine du monde, that ‘I was born from there and I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to get back there’; not even the idea that at the moment of orgasm the individual absents itself and returns to the circle of natural reproduction, becoming momentarily nothing but a member of the species. No, given Ferenczi’s insistence on recapitulationalism, desire for the prenatal state is ultimately a yearning for the stage of evolution prior to the ascent onto land; in other words, the peculiar nature of coitus is understood ultimately as a repercussion of phylogenetic trauma. So the contention is that in coitus the intense investment of libidinal energy in the genital organ aims at casting off the itchy libidinal representative, which would symbolically swim back to the Precambrian, playing an executive managerial role by taking the whole organism’s pent-up stress with it!
Thus is revealed the ultimate sense of a fourfold parallelism between evolutionary history, biological reproduction, physical individuation, and psychic fantasy life, as they momentarily enter into alignment. An overdetermination combines the hallucinatory return to the intrauterine situation and the replaying of the anxiety and rage generated at birth—psychic echoes of ontogenetic echoes of phylogenetic traumata. In pursuing an ‘extremely general biological tendency which lures the organism to a return to the state of rest enjoyed before birth’,6 the organism at once finds a balm for its congenital woes…and ensures their perpetuity in its offspring. Through some ruse of evolutionary history, the phylogenetically-inherited frustration of being expelled from the beatific oceanic element is ‘worked through’ in the ontogenetic act!
What profit could there possibly be in attending to such an obsolete and frankly embarrassing theoretical misadventure? As I said, I’d like to draw attention to a theory of symbolism that Ferenczi sketches out in passing:
Should our hypothesis some day be verified, it would in turn operate to clarify the mode of origin of symbols in general. Genuine symbols would then acquire the value of historic monuments, they would be the historical precursors of current modes of activity and memory vestiges to which one remains prone to regress physically and mentally.
A ‘genuine symbol’, then, is the product of neither imagination nor intellection, but a kind of encrypted artefact of material history. In insisting, remarkably, that ‘the sea is not the symbol of the mother. The mother is a symbol of the sea’, Ferenczi indicates a mechanism for the formation of symbols that doesn’t pass primarily by way of human imagination: the link between symbol and symbolised is not secured by the interpretive mind; rather the symbolic relation and the interpreter capable of cognizing that relation are produced alongside each other as secondary symptoms or repercussions of another real relation. What is inaugurated here is the possibility of a naturalized account of the production of aesthetic relations wherein the human and its aesthemes are produced side by side. Non-cognitive responses to phenomena don’t pass by way of the unfathomable depth of the subject nor by way of immaterial aesthetic essences.
This question might be clarified by comparing Ferenczi’s with Kant’s theory of symbolism: For Kant the symbol presents in experience, via analogy, something that is supersensible—beyond experience—yet which we must make use of (in an appropriately ‘oriented’ way) in order to make collective sense of our experience. Whereas for Ferenczi what is being evoked by the symbol is an actual experience—albeit one that does not belong to ‘me’ except qua phylogenetic memory. Thus Ferenczi does not stop at extending the biogenetic law into the thesis that perigenesis recapitulates phylogeny. Whereas for Kant reason determines the aesthetic as a relay of the idea, he suggests that biotrauma determines the idea as a relay of archaeoaesthesis—and therefore that symbogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
Here we are close to what Kielmeyer sought to construct: a ‘threefold parallelism between geological or earth history, natural history or phylology, and human culture civilization and thought’ whereby ideas are natural products that ‘recapitulate, repeat, literally, the constitution or the organization of all these series in everything we do’.7 Such a thesis (once again, a disreputable one) also reasserts itself in Deleuzian-Bergsonian ‘universal sympathy’, a ‘florid vision’ discussed by Christian Kerslake in his heterodox work on Deleuze,8 and according to which evolutionary theory provides an account that both explains the apparently preternatural ‘sympathy’ of the denizens of the biosphere in terms of natural mechanisms, and at the same time reveals a process of phylogeny whose complexity precludes any straightforward recapitulation. Likewise, Daniel Barker states:
Haeckel’s widely discredited Recapitulation Thesis […] is a theory compromised by its organicism, but its wholesale rejection was an overreaction. Ballard’s response [in The Drowned World] is more productive and balanced, treating dna as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record, without rigid onto-phylogenic correspondence. The mapping of spinal-levels onto neuronic time is supple, episodic, and diagonalizing. It concerns plexion between blocks of machinic transition, not strict isomorphic—or stratic—redundancy between scales of chronological order. Mammal dna contains latent fish-code (amongst many other things).9
If the unconscious is anything then it is a biological (and therefore evolutionary) unconscious, and immanent fish-memory perfuses human aesthetics…. The Deleuzian development of the notion of repetition evidently owes something to this same thought: ‘it is true that our loves repeat our feelings for the mother, but the latter themselves repeat still other loves, ones that we ourselves have not lived’.10 This is very much a Jungian inheritance. As Kerslake recalls, Jung talks about intuition in the human as ‘the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious content, a sudden idea, or “hunch”’, a process of ‘unconscious perception’ that owes precisely to this strange sympathetic community. The genius would be one who is able to loosen the strictures of organic specificity in order to move within this element of embryonic forces: to paint like a lion, or to dance like a lizard…. Éric Alliez amplifies this point in his discussion of the virtualizing labour of the painter, describing how Delacroix in his Lion Hunt undoes the partitioning of species through his attainment of an affective sympathy with the embryonic forces that shape Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire’s ‘plane of composition’; a painting wherein all animate forms are essentially ‘unformed and ambiguous beings’, constituting a ‘terrible community’ that calls for a becoming-serpent of the painter….11
(A note on delirious method seems apt: for Ferenczi it is as much a matter of using the imaginary that emerges during analysis as a basis for ‘decod[ing] the vast secrets of the developmental history of the species’ as of enlightening ourselves on the meaning of said symbolism through recourse to natural history. In other words this is one of those singular points where psychoanalysis is indistinguishable from the delirium it treats—‘As our teacher Freud has often repeated […] it is certainly no disgrace if one goes astray in making such flights into the unknown’).
There are a whole set of writings that extend the suggestion of this contagious, immemorial sympathy operating via the aesthetic. In Ballard, a given sensory environment might trigger virtual phylogenetic regression, the ultimate suggestion being perhaps that affective experience simply is nothing other than this: a transit within archaeopsychic space, triggered by aesthetic response (symbolic relations are routes back to real relations). But if, in traditional psychoanalytic terms, such a delirious method promises the wherewithal to put development on the right track to ‘maturity’, we should insist that this ‘terrible community’, must extend even beyond the contingent history of the biosphere, offering a space for a truly artificial aesthesis that experiments with unrealized portions of this virtuality.
Such a geotraumatics collapses the psychoanalytic account of trauma and repetition into the recapitulation thesis: one would recover lost memories not through a talking cure but by being immersed in the stimuli of a certain environment, just like Ballard’s Kerans, or (the Proustian) Madeleine as she is led into the forest in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And whereas for psychoanalysis symptoms are memories of ‘experiences’ that the subject at the time could not ‘experience’, for geotraumatics aesthetic response is a matter of navigation within a memory bank of experiences that the subject never had, except insofar as he or she was produced alongside it as part of a broader and deeper memory.
This complex of ideas has also been interesting to me in reading Deleuze’s early text, ‘Desert Islands’, in many ways the most enigmatic of his texts, where he speaks of the human as being the consciousness of the island. During this period Deleuze had an intense friendship with the novelist Michel Tournier, whose Friday, or the Other Island is a retelling of Robinson Crusoe, from a kind of Jungian perspective, where the protagonist ends up melting into the island, becoming a part of its larger organism.
It is—quite evidently!—impossible in such a short time to extract the kernel of conceptual insight here from its entertaining yet egregiously pseudoscientific husk, and to reconstruct it in suitably ‘supple and diagonalizing’ form. I would merely insist that any discourse on aesthetics that doesn’t involve itself in decrypting human experience down to at least premammalian strata can only be a quaint parochial addressing protocol; it remains superficial in the sense that it’s stuck at the stage where the geologist might name a geological stratum ‘Devonian’…. By the same token, though, if (notwithstanding the importance of neoteny, and the contributions of the memories formed in a human lifetime) aesthetic experience is fundamentally archaeophanic, this doesn’t guarantee that any device or trigger would promptly and neatly draw to the surface some particular stratum. We are talking about cryptography here (supple, episodic and diagonalizing—remembering also that Freud’s very first theory of hysteria clothes itself in the language of both cryptography and geology, simultaneously disavowing them as mere rhetorical devices). And yet such strong alignments are perhaps not impossible.
Now, I used the word aesthemes, enduring components of human aesthetic experience (what Ferenczi calls ‘true symbols’) whose deep resonance and transcendent qualities—in marketing and advertising as well as in the visual arts—make appeal to a transcendent self which, through sensory experience, is intimately touched by ideas that are equally transcendent. (The blue of a painting can become the blue of the sky and then a transcendent blue symbolising freedom, only to a soul capable of sensing blue and of thinking freedom.) The transcendence of the subject is reproduced or affirmed at the same time as the transcendence of an aesthetic essence beyond any particular material instantiation. But this beyondness and this transcendence in fact should, in a moment of ‘descendentalism’ (to use Iain Hamilton Grant’s word) be referred instead to the vast memory system I just spoke about.
And what about an art that blocked this mirroring relation? One dimension of Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz’s work seems precisely to involve addressing certain inherited aesthemes (the play of light on water, skin colour, the colour blue)12 not by symptomatically repeating their gestures (reproduction and epidemic), but also not by simply refusing them (the phantasm of a conceptuality entirely uncontaminated by the aesthetic—which Rosenkranz’s work on Yves Klein problematizes nicely).
What really struck me in her work—and I spent a long time trying to explain over and over again to myself what it is that was going on—is a kind of formal congelation of these aesthemes. When they are made to appear in opaque, objectal form, they’re no longer able to do this mirroring, this transcendent reflection, but instead appear as objects—or, better, products. For Rosenkranz’s work is also concerned with how capitalism, while on one hand certainly making use of the transcendence of aesthemes, tends on the other hand, operationally, to automatically depose them through its unsentimental isolation, machinic abstraction, intensification and mass-production.
In the series ‘Firm Being’ (2009) Rosenkranz takes plastic water bottles and, in a gross reification of symbolic matter, fills them instead with the silicone product Dragon Skin, intended as a prosthetic double for human skin. This exemplifies the artist’s use of a palette of readymade aesthemes in such a way as to strip them of their semantic transparency. We no longer find in this bloc of skin tone the luminous essence corresponding to our internal depth; and the product’s promise to impregnate us with that indefinable something instead becomes opaque and troubling.
But this does not assume an ‘elimination’ of aesthetic effect. It’s instead to do with a treatment that (in the Laruellian sense) reduces its sufficiency. It’s this method of blocking that is really interesting to me. This refusal produces a new kind of object. It’s something like how Laruelle describes his practice, in terms of the use of philosophy as a material in order to produce something else. As he rightly says, the only way to do that is to prepare the material by looking at it from the point of view of this kind of sideways causality: the aesthetic relation is produced alongside the apparatus of aesthesis.
If I were to talk about this as a ‘non-art’, I would want to distinguish it from the art-history of various ‘non-arts’ which have been one kind of negation or another—just as Laruelle wants to distinguish his non-philosophy from the perpetual attempts of philosophy to escape itself. It would be a kind of non-standard expansion of the domain of the aesthetic in which aesthetic materials (aesthemes) are acknowledged and utilised but their sufficiency reduced, Crucially, in doing so, some other kind of experience occurs in which, rather than being subject to the perennial passions of the aesthetic, we enter a context that challenges our ‘being prone to regression’, that scrambles memory, concept, and sensation, triggering new responses that call up synthetic memories of the future which, for the moment, we have no words to describe.
1. S. Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. H. A. Bunker (Albany, NY: Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1938).
2. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 2.
3. Following a distinguished psychoanalytical tradition, Ferenczi talks exclusively about male sexual experience, with a characteristically Freudian promissory note that discussion of the female aspect of the problem must be postponed to a subsequent occasion (Thalassa, 18n1).
4. Ferenczi, Thalassa, 20.
5. S. J. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977).
6. Thalassa., 19.
7. I. Hamilton Grant, in Hydroplutonic Kernow (Falmouth: Urbanomic, forthcoming 2015).
8. See C. Kerslake, ‘Insects and Incest: From Bergson and Jung to Deleuze’, http://www.multitudes.net/Insects-and-Incest-From-Bergson/. According to this Bergsonian-inspired theory even the predator in relation to its prey relies on a kind of mutual virtual inheritance, an ‘inner history of nature’, that allows it to enter into ‘sympathy’ with the prey so as to secure it, a type of intelligence which depends on a ‘lived intuition’ rather than a calculative judgment and which, as Kerslake argues, is assimilated to a dissociative somnambulistic state.
9. Nick Land, ‘Barker Speaks,’ in Fanged Noumena: Selected Writings 1987–2007 (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic and Sequence Press, 2008), 501. Italics added.
10. G. Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. J. McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 87.
11. É. Alliez, L’Oeil-Cerveau: Nouvelle Histoires de la peinture moderne (Paris: Vrin, 2007), chapter 2.
12. See P. Rosenkranz, No Core (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012), which contains a more extensive essay by myself, and one by Reza Negarestani focusing in particular on the question of the evolutionary provenance of blue as aestheme.