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→Moor Eeffoc
=''Moor Eeffoc''=
A similar limitation characterizes Catherine Malabou's"ontology of the accident," which brings negativity to its extreme in the guise of an external organic or physical catastrophe that totally destroys the symbolic texture of the subject's psychic life, allowing for no interpretation, no symbolic appropriation.(21 ) Malabou's "ontology of the accident" is thus
an ontology finally taking into account, as previous orientations have not yet done, explosive events of indigestible, meaningless traumas in which destructive plasticity goes so far as to destroy plasticity itself, in which plasticity is exposed, thanks to itself, to its own disruption. . . . The massive cerebrolesions of catastrophic neurotraumas produce the bodies of human organisms living on but not, as it were, living for, that is, not Inclining toward future plans, projects. Plasticity (including neuroplasticity) stands permanently under the shadow of the virtual danger of its liquidation.(22)
A materialist notion of humanity should effectively take into account the shadow of a permanent threat to our survival at a multitude of levels, from external threats (an asteroid hitting the earth, volcanic eruptions, and others) through individual catastrophes like Alzheimer's up to the possibility that humanity will destroy itself as a nonintended consequence of its scientific and technological progress. Is there, however, a ''catastrophe ''that always already occurred and that is missing from the list of external threats: the catastrophe that is the emergence of subjectivity, of the human mind, out of nature? The exclusion of the real of ''this ''catastrophe (what Freud called primordial repression) is what introduces the gap that separates the real from reality—it is on account of this gap that what we experience as external reality always has to rely on a fantasy and that when the raw real is forced upon us it causes the experience of the loss of reality. G. K. Chesterton was on the right track here in his wonderful description of Charles Dickens's realism:
[Dickens] was a dreamy child, thinking mostly of his own dreary prospects. Yet he saw and remembered much of the streets and squares he passed. Indeed, as a matter of fact, he went the right way to work unconsciously to do so. He did not go in for 'observation,' a priggish habit; he did not look at Charing Cross to improve his mind or count the lampposts in Holborn to practice his arithmetic. But unconsciously he made all these places the scenes of the monstrous drama in his miserable little soul. He walked in darkness under the lamps of Holborn, and was crucified at Charing Cross. So for him ever afterwards these places had the beauty that only belongs to battlefields. For our memory never fixes the facts which we have merely observed. The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see if we shut our eyes are not the scenes that we have stared at under the direc tion direction of guidebooks; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not look at all—the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about something else—about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow. We can see the background now because we did not see it then. So Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places. For him ever afterwards these streets were mortally romantic; they were dipped in the purple dyes of youth and its tragedy, and rich with irrevocable sunsets.
Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions—a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door—which he endows with demoniac life. Things seem more actual than they really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality; it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiæ grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffeeshops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, 'of which I only recollect it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with "COFFee ROOM" painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffeeroom now, but where there is an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR eeFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood.' That wild word, 'Moor eeffoc', is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects.(23)
Strange realism whose exemplary case—"the motto of all effective realism" —is a ''signifier ''MOOR eeFFOC, whose lack of meaning (signified) is more than supplemented by a rich condensation of unconscious obscene libidinal echoes (fears, horrors, obscene imaginations) so that it effectively functions as a direct signifier (or, rather, cypher) of ''jouissance, ''signaling a point at which meaning breaks down! So if we are looking for the traces of ''das Ding ''in all this, they are not to be found in external reality the way it operates independently of our investments into it—say, the way oval glass plates on the doors of coffee rooms really are—but at those myste rious points within the universe of meaning where meaning breaks down and is overshadowed by a nameless abyss of ''jouissance''. This is why when he stumbles upon the meaningless signifier MOOR eeFFOC, "a shock goes through [his] blood." It may appear that Chesterton is here simply asserting the key role of inner psychic traumas, desires, obsessions, and fears: "Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places." That is, certain places impressed him deeply not because of their inherent qualities but because of the intense inner experiences (concerning sin and love) they served as a pretext for and gave birth to. One can easily imagine here a critic of psychoanalysis like Malabou sarcastically asking if a devastating catastrophe in ''external reality ''like a gigantic tsunami or being exposed to brutal torture also acquires weight only if a previous psychic trauma resonates in it. But are things as simple as that? What makes inanimate objects alive is the way they are enveloped by dreams; this is not the same as the famous Freudian dream where the burning cloth on the son's coffin triggers in the sleeping father the terrifying dream image of his dread son approaching him with "Father, can't you see I'm burning!" In Freud's case, the dreamer (father) escapes from reality into a dream where he encounters an even more terrifying real. In Dickens, there is no escape from ordinary reality; a detail of reality itself gets spectralized, is experienced as a moment from a nightmarish dream. Something similar takes place continuously in Franz Kafka's work; Kafka is also a master of "effective realism." But let us rather take an unexpected example from cinema.
In James Cameron's ''Titanic ''(1997) there is a short shot from above of an unidentified old couple lying embraced in their bed while the ship is already sinking, so their cabin is half-flooded and a stream of water is running all around the bed. This shot, although meant as a realistic shot, creates the impression of a dream scene—a bed with the tightly embraced couple in the midst of strong flow of water, touchingly rendering the stability of love in the midst of a disaster. This detail in an otherwise average commercial movie bears witness to an authentic cinematic touch, that of making reality appear as a dream scene. A variation of the same motif are those magic moments in some films when it seems as if an entity that belongs to fantasy space intervenes in ordinary reality so that the frontier that separates the fantasy space from ordinary reality is momentarily suspended.
Suffice it to recall a scene from ''Possessed'', Clarence Brown's melodrama from 1931 with Joan Crawford. Crawford, playing a poor small-town girl, stares amazed at the luxurious private train that slowly passes in front of her at the local railway station; through the windows of the carriages she sees the rich life going on in the illuminated inside—dancing couples, cooks preparing dinner, and so on. The crucial feature of the scene is that we, the spectators, together with Crawford, perceive the train as a magic, immaterial apparition from another world. When the last carriage passes by, the train comes to a halt and we see on the observation desk a good-natured drunkard with a glass of champagne in his hand, which stretches over the railing towards Crawford—as if, for a brief moment, the fantasyspace intervened in reality.(24)
It is along these lines that we should understand also what Chesterton says about Dickens's "eerie realism" in which "the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact": "a shock goes through my blood" when I stumble upon a small material detail that stirs up something in my "inner life"—not some "deeper meaning" but something traumatic, nonsymbolizable, extimate (external in the very heart of my being). One should emphasize the hyperrealism of such moments; the spectralization of material reality overlaps with full focus on material objects. How is this paradox possible? There is only one solution: external reality itself is not simply out there, it is already transcendentally constituted so that it is experienced as such—as "normal" reality out there—only if it fits these transcendental coordinates.
Let's take a traumatic event like the 9/11 World Trade Center (WTC) destruction. One "should therefore invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere; quite the reverse—it was before the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving Third World horrors as something which was not actually part of our social reality, as something which existed (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen—and what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality."(25 ) "In short, one should discern which part of reality is 'transfunctionalized' through fantasy, so that, although it is part of reality, it is perceived in a fictional mode"—exactly as our examples from ''Titanic ''and ''Possessed ''show in which part of reality is spectralized, acquires dreamlike quality. "Much more difficult than to denounce/unmask (what appears as) reality as fiction is to recognize in 'real' reality the part of fiction."(26)
This, then, is what the Malabou-like critique misses when it accuses psychoanalysis of ignoring the bodily weight of traumatic events, thereby reducing their impact to their stirring up some previous dormant psychic trauma. Let us imagine witnessing or being submitted to extremely brutal torture. Precisely because the impact of the scene is so shattering—as it would undermine the basic coordinates of what we perceive as "solid external reality"—the scene would not be experienced as part of ordinary reality but as an unreal, nightmarish fiction. The sense of ordinary external reality and extreme trauma are mutually exclusive. This is the ultimate reason why, as Chesterton saw it clearly, dream and "effective realism" go together.
