The Limits of the Fetish @ CUNY GRAD CENTER Interdisciplinary Conference: Desire: From Eros to Eroticism, Nov 10-11 (MORE INFO TBA)

The Fetish of the Fetish (of the Fetish, etc…): Freud, Derrida, and Kristeva on the Fetish,Sexual Difference, and (undermining) the Dialectic – Eric Shorey, New School for Social Research, Liberal Studies MA

iDollatory: For the Love of Doll(s) – Veronica Cassidy, New School for Social Research, Liberal Studies MA

The Humanimal; Humans, Animals: Asymptotal Ontologies – Stefanie Sara Krasnow, New School for Social Research, Liberal Studies MA

When Freud wrote his 1927 essay on Fetishism, he reluctantly proclaimed that all fetishes are the symbolic replacement for the penis the child believed the mother once had. This definition has inspired and exasperated a number of theorists and thinkers. Psychoanalytic thinking of fetishism has been appropriated by queer theorists, deconstructionists, feminists, and post-structuralists alike. The fetish is a particular kind of erotic desire worthy of critical attention.

Although problematic, it seems necessary, in the 21^st century, to revisit these theories of desire. What sexual proclivities, which had at one time been considered fetishistic, can now be re-examined as normative, or perhaps even symptomatic of our culture? What behaviors, under closer examination, are more or less aberrant than they had once seemed?

This panel will examine deconstructionist, post-modern, post-human, feminist, and queer revisions of the theory of the fetish. In what ways is the concept of the fetish, itself, fetishistic? In what ways does the fetish problematize philosophical traditions of truth and dialectical thinking? The panel will then go on to further investigate sexual behaviors, specifically agalmatophilia and bestiality, in order to rethink the discourse surrounding normativity, ontology, and desire. Might we think of sex doll infatuation as not simply a bizarre lifestyle choice, but instead as a symbolic crystallization of post-modern digital-age anxieties? By examining the culture of Pygmalianism, it might be demonstrable that, while off-putting, sex doll owners have sincere, affectionate, and loving (albeit oftentimes misogynistic) relationships with their synthetic partners. Might bestiality only be considered taboo because it brings into question the fallibility of the duality of the animal/human relationship? And, if this is the case, to what extent is bestiality philosophically, morally, or sexually desirable or justifiable? By re-thinking the limits of the concept of the fetish, perhaps we can gain a greater insight into the functioning of desire itself.

Dominic Pettman recently made remarks that attacking anthropocentrism is the trendy thing to do right now in academia. That being said, are there still new ways of doing this without falling into buzzwordy traps or defaulting onto the same animal-human ontologies that have already been explored (to death)? What theoretical ground hasn’t been covered by anti-humanists?

It might be strange to look towards the horror genre for the answer to these questions. It is not shocking or new to say that the monstrous in any horror text is directly related (symbolically or metaphorically) to the Other, nor would it be shocking to say that horror reflects the material conditions of the time period the texts were made in: monsters of horror movies and literature have always recapitulated our anxieties over sexuality, animality, and technology. The cannon of monsters has included the deformed, the queer, the insane, women, the dark-skinned, children etc… (Nor is it surprising that haunted spaces are often related to these categories of otherness: abandoned insane asylums, nunneries, orphanages, prisons, hospitals, etc…) But most importantly it has included the dead: zombies, vampires, frankensteins, ghosts. Can the dead (or un-dead) be put into the same category of Otherness as queers, animals, and non-whites? Is the anthropocentric worldview a life-centric one that excludes considerations of the dead and the damned? Is it because the dead are in-human (or in Hodgson’s lexicon: ab-human) that they are treated so differently?

If we look at the description of the outer worlds as described in Carnacki, it seems that the world of the dead exists right on top of the world of the living:

‘Well, we have an earth-sphere of solid matter on which to stamp as solidly as we like; and round about that sphere there lies a ring of gases the constituents of which enter largely into all life, as we understand life - that is, air.

‘But this is not the only circle of gas which is floating round us. There are, as I have been forced to conclude, larger and more attenuated “gas” belts lying, zone on zone, far up and around us. These compose what I have called the inner circles. They are surrounded in turn by a circle or belt of what I have called, for want of a better word, “emanations”.

‘This circle which I have named the Outer Circle can not lie less than a hundred thousand miles off the earth, and has a thickness which I have presumed to be anything between five and ten million miles. I believe, but I cannot prove, that it does not spin with the earth but in the opposite direction, for which a plausible cause might be found in the study of the theory upon which a certain electrical machine is constructed.

‘I have reason to believe that the spinning of this, the Outer Circle, is disturbed from time to time through causes which are quite unknown to me, but which I believe are based in physical phenomena. Now, the Outer Circle is the psychic circle, yet it is also physical. To illustrate what I mean I must again instance electricity, and say that just as electricity discovered itself to us as something quite different from any of our previous conceptions of matter, so is the Psychic or Outer Circle different from any of our previous conceptions of matter. Yet it is none the less physical in its origin, and in the sense that electricity is physical, the Outer or Psychic Circle is physical in its constituents. Speaking pictorially it is, physically, to the Inner Circle what the Inner Circle is to the upper strata of the air, and what the air - as we know that intimate gas - is to the waters and the waters to the solid world. (“The Hog”, Hodgson)

Although describing an ostensibly fictional world, Hodgson’s musings on the dead reflect attitudes about the afterlife not so distinctly different from the Jewish notion of Sheol (in which the dead float freely in a realm circumscribed on top of the earth) or the fictional realms of the dead posited in contemporary film (Insidious, Beetlejuice, Poltergeist). The underworld: even the word we often use to describe the land of dead suggest that they are, topologically and semiotically, below us (even if this world might be interlaced or piled on top of us). If the dead and the living occupy territories that overlap and/or intersect our world, why is it that attitudes about hauntings always suggest that the ghosts are the invaders? Weren’t the dead always already here before us? Our attitudes about ghosts and phantoms constantly have a bizarrely imperializing or even orientalist flavor to them: we see ghosts as exotic foreigners invading our world, and never the other way around. Then, suddenly, we are perturbed when they demand we leave their domain. Any attempts to talk with the dead are characterized by simplistic or condescending call and response communications, as if the ghosts were children or mentally impaired: “Can you hear me? Are you out there? Respond with yes or no.” As if the ghosts were too stupid to speak in full sentences. Contemporary reality shows like Ghost Adventures allow the muscly host to assert his hyper-masculinity against the “cowardly” dead. When the living invade the land of the dead, the haunted spaces allow the living to assert their hetero-normativity and hegemonic positions. Traditionally, people who can communicate with the dead are already “othered” figures: histrionic women, animals, the mentally ill, aboriginals, and children; only “othered” groups can communicate in the same “language”. In this instance, it is not only the othered individuals, but the bodies of the othered individuals, that become the technologies or media through which communication can occur: like the medium who expels ectoplasm from all of her orifices, or the shaman who dances his communication with the spirit world.

If this is the case: it is no surprise that mediation plays a role in communication with the dead. The act of translating living language (human language) into the language of the dead (ab-human language) would have to require technologies of various kinds because the idea of relating to the dead through some kind of typical person-to-person communication would be inconceivable: humans can’t talk to animals directly (the question will always remain: to what extent do animals understand language?), and we the living can’t talk to the dead directly. The dead must be mediated, communication with the dead must be mediated, because they exist on a different symbolic, semiotic, or psycho-linguistic register and only technology (high, low, or old) can bridge the gap between the registers.

Derrida was not incorrect when he stated in Specters of Marx that we need a new science of the dead, a hauntology. But even this tongue-in-cheek suggestion reeks of anthropocentrism, as if the dead need to be studied like animals. Do hegemonic, hetero-normative, or anthropocentric attitudes immediately cast the dead in the same position as the animal? It would almost be too easy to say that the dead, in fiction, are used as metaphors for otherness, but perhaps we should stop seeing the dead as metaphors for things and start considering the dead seriously, as their own category. This is not to say that a new science of ghost hunting will prove with any kind of assurance that there is life after death (a term that, in this context, might itself be considered misconstrued or repressive, as if “life” is the necessary qualification for being considered worthy of attention) but that we might need to take into more serious consideration the ways in which the dead effect the living, or (more importantly) vice versa. In what ways do the living effect the dead?

So much attention is given to the ways in which haunted houses effect the living but very little phenomenological attention is paid to what it would be like for the ghost. The aforementioned film Beetlejuice is one of the few exceptions: a movie about a house being haunted by the living. Do ghosts stuck in homes feel like birds trapped in airports: confused and lost in a vast artificial territory they cannot comprehend? Or is the experience something totally different: something that escapes the confines of human language and metaphor? Is it only through technology or mediation that we can understand the experience of the dead?

-eric

After our Superflat panel at Anime Boston, we received a few emails from readers with really interesting questions about the movement and the presentation.  Here are some excerpts from these conversations:

reader:  it never felt to me that Murakami was condemning cutesy or fetishized art in and of itself, but the ridiculous abundance of it in Japanese culture (virtually EVERYTHING has a cute mascot there) and people’s intense obsession with such escapism that they resort to  If you look at the personal blog of one of Murakami’s otaku friends that I mentioned a while ago, he’s into a lot of weird/cute/creepy otaku things and draws manga containing fanservice of underage girls. BUT, he also has an active social life and an actual family that he supports, and leaves his strange interests in the realm of fiction - he doesn’t seem at all like someone Murakami would condemn, despite whatever weird anime things he might be into.

There are people who were very confused by Murakami’s efforts to defend a loli fanservice-filled manga during last year’s anime/manga censoring fiasco, because they assumed that Murakami was simply against such things because he deems them as being harmful in the same way that Americans deem them as being harmful (THEY LEAD TO CHILDREN BEING RAPED IN REAL LIFE etc etc) when in reality I don’t think his problem isn’t with the existence of such things, but with its sheer prevalence (there is Shonen Jump manga aimed at young boys with loli fanservice in it) and people’s intense obsession with it that turns them into severely broken people. With some effort someone can easily balance strange anime fandom with a decent, productive life, and chances are Murakami is okay with such people. What I’m saying is that Murakami is clearly far, far from having a Miyazaki-esque view of moe and loli and whatnot. But due to their gut reaction to such things, people instantly assume that Murakami is simply against such art in any form and views it as inherently immoral and wrong.

It should also be noted that one of Murakami’s superflat artists, as I mentioned earlier, is a self-described “lolicon”, and when asked if his work contains he instantly responded with a “no”. And really, all his work shows this off this theme - it’s sometimes intentionally distorted and strange in a traditional superflat way and can be seen as a self parody (i.e. “man, I’m pretty freaking weird”) but sometimes it’s simply delivered straight-facedly without any attempt at parody: (NSFW!) http://www.hintmag.com/artcrawl/artcrawl.php - if Murakami was completely revolted by such things, he wouldn’t support his protege in showing his art to the world; art containing the sexualization of underage girls and boys that he admits is not societal criticism, but simply about “releasing his fantasy world through his work, instead of acting it out in real life.”.

While Murakami himself is most likely not into these things, some of his artists ARE and don’t really make any efforts to hide it. He’s also a huge fan of Evangelion (and its creator Hideaki Anno), a show that sexualizes the hell out of its 14 year old characters (with Anno’s approval no less - he’s the one who decided to make Asuka’s plugsuit even more fanservicey in 2.22). But once again, Evangelion also has an anti-‘otaku basement dweller’ message and is meant to show off just how bad people will end up if they avoid society and facing their problems head-on. A lot of people see this mix of unironic fanservice and otaku criticism as being completely hypocritical, but I don’t necessarily see it as such - with some effort, you can be a nerd and be into some weird things to an extent while still having a fulfilling social life.

Also, one more question - in that video, when you listed works that you guys view as being ‘superflat’ like FLCL and Persona 3, was it just your own personal thoughts with no real connection to Murakami and other self-described superflat artists? Because as far as I know, FLCL wasn’t really associated with Murakami or his art (Murakami only seems interested in Gainax’s older work), let alone Persona 3 and 4 - am I wrong here?

eric: At a certain point we have to remember that an artists work is separate from their personal life, nor does the fact that Murakami has friends who are striaght up otaku disprove that there is an element of critique in Murakamis work.  If we take the Andy Warhol example again (and I am really pushing heavily on this point because I think it is important), we can observe that while Warhol was friends with a number of socialites and celebrities, going as far as to paint personalized portraits for/of them, he was never not criticizing the condition of their social status.  The Leo Castelli portrait in particular is often studied for this reason. In fact his relationships with these celebrities itself was a form of criticism: he himself became a super-flattened ever-bored persona, the unsatisfied voyeur; his entire personality was a form of critique, a scathing hyper-exaggeration, a character type.  And yet, it was 100% sincere: he truly loved celebrities, he truly loved being famous.  Murakami may (or may not!) being playing a similar game: his relationships with otaku, his status as an otaku are itself a manifestation of his criticisms, an invented half-ironic half-sincere persona developed in order to criticize and celebrate, to understand (and appreciate!) from within, to de-construct and re-construct.  Whether or not Murakami has friends who are actual lolicom fans or moe mangaka seems less signficant than the semiotics of the pieces themselves which, in my opinion, are not harmless symptoms of kawaii culture but instead point to the hidden pernicious machinations of kawaii culture.  Murakami’s defense of loli art, when seen from this perspective is not confusing at all, it makes perfect sense.  Nor could I really picture any artist, even if condemning a certain artistic style for being pernicious, advocating any kind of censorship.  This kind of tactic is seen by a number of post-modern artists: J.G. Ballard was put on trial for obscenity in the early 80s (forgive me, that date might be wrong?); when asked if his literature is obscene he replied “Of Course!  It is supposed to be!”

If Murakami is playing this kind of semiotic game, then the question of irony is never absent, nor can it never be fully sussed out.  If Murakami is both celebrating and critiquing simultaneously, then he could easily be doing neither or nothing at all: his art is simply an examination, affectless, meaningless, lacking depth, or super-flattened.  The term super-flat, super-flat art itself, is necessarily self-reflexive in this way.

When commenting upon Evangelion you say: “A lot of people see this mix of unironic fanservice and otaku criticism as being completely hypocritical, but I don’t necessarily see it as such - with some effort, you can be a nerd and be into some weird things to an extent while still having a fulfilling social life.” This is the exact stance I think that Murakami is trying to take in all of his art: otaku criticism and unironic fan-service presented simultaneously.

My memory is a bit fuzzy but I am pretty sure there was a video showing (or maybe a special screening of?) FLCL during the original superflat exhibit in NYC a few years ago.  That being said, our presentation, and a general ongoing project I’ve had (possibly being developed into an MA / PhD thesis?!) is to expand and reinterpret Murakami’s use of the word/concept superflat so as to better understand the post-modern condition.  We were/are attempting to investigate the concept of super-flat as either symptomatic of the post-modern condition or an integral tactic for understanding the machinations of this condition.  Questions that are included in this investigation would be: what cultural texts could be better examined from a super-flat lens?  To what extent are super-flat products the result of the post-modern flattening of affect, late-capitalist consumer culture, and 21st century technology?  With these questions in mind, we could easily see things outside of Murakami’s scope as super-flat: persona 3-4 were included in the presentation as an example of this, along with the american vinyl toy industry (Kidrobot) and the rise of American celebrities like Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and Lady Gaga.  We were/are attempting to understand the ways in which the super-flattening of concepts like high/low art and east/west art manifested.  So Persona 3/4 worked out to be a great example: the way in which the simulated experience of a (simulation of the idea of) “Japanese” childhood is sold to American audiences is, in a word, superflat.

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After our panel at Anime Boston we had a number of interesting questions about Superflat and the theoretical discourse surrounding anime.  Here are is a little bit of some of these conversations:

Reader: Well, first thing’s first. As someone who has not read Murakami’s books, I’m above all very curious about a certain preconception about Superflat that seems extremely common among westerners: that the entire movement, at its core, is meant to be a protest against things like otaku fetishism (mainly lolicon) and consumerism. This is such a common idea among English-speaking Murakami fans that people even go as far as to dissect his commercial works (like Superflat Monogram of all things, which is literally a COMMERCIAL) to find an anti-commercialism message. The “anti-moe/loli” thing seems equally misguided considering Murakami himself is friends with and has over the years supported the artistic careers of many people who draw that sort of thing, including a man who is a self-described “lolicon” (something that Murakami himself pointed out).

Has Murakami himself EVER made a single statement implying such a view of the ‘intention’ of Superflat artists? Or is it just a result of a lot of the work that he and his cronies have made? Because really, there’s a huge difference between making fun of something and aiming to outright protest against it and label it as something inherently harmful that must go.

eric: Those are all important points.  What needs to be thought about is the way that pop art, all pop art including super-flat, functions semiotically.  That is to say: there is always a double gesture happening, at once condemning and celebrating, simultaneously.  If we take the claim seriously that Murakami is the Warhol of Japan, then we must remember that Warhol, too, was not outright damning celebrity or consumer culture (or in Murakami’s case, otaku/moe/kawaii culture) — it was always a mix of critique and worship, never just one or the other.

It would certainly be interesting if Murakami was some kind of staunch anti-capitalist who used his art to skewer late capitalist Japanese consumer culture, meanwhile pocketing vast sums of money and laughing his way to the bank, but I don’t think that is the case, nor do I think there is enough evidence in the art to suggest that.  Murakami clearly has a vested interest in the collapsing of low art and high art, and that interest is fueled, at the end of the day, by dollar bills and not just postmodern ideology.

That being said, to suggest that Murakami is some kind of fetishist or otaku himself, recapitulating the tropes of anime and manga for his own amusement and enjoyment, without any kind of criticism, is equally as ridiculous.  By looking at specific examples, his atom bomb series or ever his larger scaled D.O.B. paintings, it is easy to see how cliches of kawaii culture are transformed into grotesque versions of themselves, vomiting and masturbating, so that the audience does not get settled into a state of comfort or joy about these cliches.

Postmodern art, including Murakami, cannot deliver a message without ambiguity, by its very nature: no meta-narratives are present, by definition; there is no grand moral structure, lesson, or singular message or meaning to take away from any of the pieces.  It would be too cliche to JUST celebrate or JUST critique, therefore the only interesting art (to me and other postmodernists) is art that does both.

Let me know if that helps clarify your questions.  It is very possible we came across sounding like the typical western art critics you speak of, but that certainly was not the idea.

Sam:  I took it upon myself to actually look for any articles and/or interviews featuring Murakami discussing his artwork as anti-commercialism, anti-moe/loli.

What I found is not that his statements are a protest against Otaku culture and fetishism but more a interpretation of why this content and culture came to be and how he sees it changing the culture. I pulled this from an Economist article about his show in New York in 2008, a statement which I think well represents his artistic vision and understanding of where Otaku culture sprang from and something I think comes across in our panel:
“Mr Murakami argues that the Japanese fixation with violent comic books, titillating plastic figurines and super-cute creatures, such as Hello Kitty, is a product of the country’s sense of impotence following the second world war. The humiliation of Japan’s military and the rise of the female corporate executive served to invert the traditional gender hierarchy; in his writing he refers to the “self-medicated denizens of a castrated nation-state.”

As Eric mentioned before in his response, Murakami subverts images, like the mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb, as a way to comment on how uncomfortable the kawaii culture can and should be, yet one can read this as a commentary on how powerful this defeat in WW2 was and how prevalent it still is in Japanese culture today. 
Finally, I just wanted to point out that Superflat intially rose from frustrations with the post war Japanese art market and generally negative views of Japanese animation. He is quoted as saying that the market is nothing but “a shallow appropriation of Western trends” and his reaction was to make art in a non-fine arts media, hoping to rejuvenate the contemporary Japanese art scene by placing hope in animation and Otaku.

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Welcome back to Weekly Cultural Critic [which seems to be turning into monthly cultural critic, but whatever].  After playing through FF7 for the third time, I decided it was time to tackle the never-ending series head on.  Hope you enjoy!

Intro

In the same way that it is possible to take a character like Batman and create a psycho-biography, it might be possible to understand video game characters through a similar lens. Ewan Kirkland, who specializes in the semiotics of new media, once said that psycho-analyzing Silent Hill was like “shooting Freudian fish in a barrel.” Final Fantasy would be another particularly robust series for psychoanalysis: screen memories, false memories, amnesia, and filial conflicts are central themes to each iteration of the franchise. In fact, sometimes the analysis is almost too easy: the Oedipal conflicts of certain characters are the central devices of both Final Fantasy 7 and 10. Using Freudian psychoanalysis, it might be possible to understand the psychodynamics and metaphoricity of the plot at play in these games. (Spoilers ahead!)

The Oedipal Triangle

While no Freudian text specifically lays out the laws of the Oedipus complex, throughout his career Freud developed this theory or sets of theories. According to Freud, when a child is born he sees the mother as his first object of affection: the mother is the thing that gives the child sustenance. In fact, before the child has a concept of mother, he sees himself as part of his mother, he has no sense of self and other. As the child gets older, the father interjects himself in the relationship in order to preserve the incest taboo and out of jealousy that his wife gives towards the child; the child sees the father as preventing or breaking the union between mother and child. The father becomes an object of both scorn and love (ambivalence plays a huge part here); the father both protects and punishes the child for his actions towards/on/with/in the mother. The child sees the mother as an object that gives pleasure (breast feeding is pleasurable), the child wants the mother, this desire can be described as sexual. Only later in development, because of penalties enacted by the father, can the child chose a woman other than his mother (but in the image of his mother) as a love object: this is how most males become heterosexuals. The issue is that most people, especially neurotics and hysterics, play out the drama of their Oedipal complexes throughout their entire lives, literally and metaphorically. It is important to remember that the Oedipal triangle goes in all three directions: the mother battles for/between affection/persecution from the child, the child battles the father for the affection of the mother, the father battles the child for the mother but also protects the child.

In Final Fantasy 7, Sephiroth discovers that his “mother” is the extra-terrestrial being Jenova. Sephiroth is considerably more powerful than his father (Hojo) and most other people on the planet. The rest of the plot, is, essentially, Cloud trying to prevent Sephiroth from “reuniting” with his “mother” (read: fucking her). The weight of this incestuous sin is so great that it could bring about “the end of the world.” The incest taboo, at least in this universe, is so heavily penalized that entire planets are crushed under it’s power.

In Final Fatansy X we have two separate Oedipal conflicts that are (aberrantly) resolved. The entirety of the plot is spent trying to destroy Tidus’s father, Jecht. In the symbolic language of the game, the tyrannical father is transmogrified into the punishing figure of Sin. Tidus must battle his jealous and angry father his entire life: the final boss-fight of the game is the only possible resolution of his Oedipal conflict. His father, internalized after his disappearance and then re-externalized as Sin, both follows and pursues Tidus, leaving a mess of destruction behind him. Tidus must literally murder his father, as he has always (since childhood) wanted to do.

Similarly, Anima, Seymour’s mother, is a secret summon that can be obtained by Yuna. Seymour becomes the victim of his own Oedipal complex: he obtains his mother, as he obtains an object, and uses her. Having obtained his mother, having committed a metaphorical incestuous sin by “obtaining” her, he becomes evil and threatens the world: again the incest taboo is seen is a destructive force that can destroy people or planets. The aesthetics of the design of Anima are morphologically ambiguous, both phallic and vaginal (both oblong and cavernous) – the effeminate Seymour, whose own sexuality is certainly ambiguous, is expressed in this design. The Anima, in Jungian psychoanalytics, is the repressed feminine part of any male: Anima, Seymour’s mother, is the feminine part of Seymour that he tries to keep hidden (most of Anima’s body is underground, revealed only during the summons overdrive attack).

Screen Memories, Repression, and Amnesia

Screen memories are certain (if not all) memories from childhood that have been retro-actively altered and imbued with symbolic significance. They function similar to a dream in that they express a repressed infantile wish. In a screen memory, the actual memory meets the fantasy half way: a person remembers, as a child, being in a field with lots of yellow flowers. The flowers, in reality, may or may not have been yellow but the memory retains or selects the color yellow because yellow has symbolic significance in relation to a repressed desire or wish.

Considering that almost every important character in Final Fantasy has amnesia (Cloud, Tifa, every playable character in FF8, Zidane, Tidus, etc…) the screen memory becomes an important plot device. In Final Fantasy 7 almost all of Cloud’s personality is constructed by fantastical screen memories: the Nibelheim scene is essentially a screen memory. In this scene cloud remembers himself as Zach because he wants/wanted to be Zach. Cloud was literally present for the scene, however his fantasy altered the memory to express a wish. Tifa alters the same memory in a similar way: she does not interject when Cloud retells his false version of the memory: she wants the screen memory to be the “true” memory. Remember: this conflict is only sorted out when Tifa visits Cloud’s unconscious within the lifestream; the “real” memories were always there, just repressed.  Tifa acts as a psychoanalyst, excavating hidden memories to relieve Cloud of his hysterical symptoms (hearing voices, headaches, ear ringing, etc…).  This sort of confusion points to an important concept in Freud: to the unconscious there is no difference between truth and fiction cathected with affect. That is to say, if someone believes a fiction hard enough: it eventually becomes the truth for them, a truth that is even truer than the truth. (This, by the way, is implicit in the structuring of all fetishes.)

In Final Fantasy 8, there is a ponderous plot point involving amnesia. Towards the end of the game we find out that all of the characters had, at one point, been orphan companions in a foster home. The characters had all forgotten this memory: the explanation being that the Guardian Forces destroy certain memories; a person must sacrifice their memory for the power of the summon. But could it be, instead, that the memory of the foster home, although seemingly warm and comfortable, was repressed by all the characters and not destroyed by mystical forces? Surely, for a child, being parent-less in an unfamiliar land is a scene of great anxiety: perhaps no mystical forces were needed to obliterate a memory of such intense emotional power. Only the force of repression. Or, instead, that the Guardian Forces are a metaphor for repression: a power that destroys memories but also keeps us alive. Without repression, a person would be crushed under the weight of their anxieties, just as the player would be crushed by monsters without the GF. 

(In fact: a whole essay could probably be written on the transformation of “Matron” into “Sorceress Edea”; Virgin/Whore complex, Oedipal conflicts [mother as villian], etc…)

Metaphoricity, Psycho-analysis, and Video Games

Like literature, there is a certain problem with giving psychoanalytic readings of fantasy texts. Does psychoanalysis simply find itself where it wants to or was it always already there? A specific problematic of this kind could be seen in the question: Is Sin a metaphor for the father or is he the actual father, or somehow both? Andre Green, on the subject of metaphors in tragedy, says: “Tragedy is the metaphor of dream. The language of tragedy is not the language of dream: it is its obscure double. […] It is as if the whole tragedy represents the associations of the dream” (“Orestes and Oedipus” 361, my emphasis). Could we say the same of fantasy? It seems that psychoanalytic readings often occupy a space between metaphor and literality: there is a bizarre fluctuation of metaphoricity within any fantasy or mythological text. This kind of oscillating metaphoricity itself is a kind of schizophrenic logic: mythical logic and the conventions of mythology in tragedy conflate, distort, confuse, and obfuscate the difference between metaphor, magic, psychical structures, and “actual” or “external” reality. The symbolic order goes through a complete break-down, internal structures and external structures slip in and out of themselves manifested in the interactions of the magical in the human world.

[Hope you enjoyed this one.  As always DMG->MP is interested in what you have to say. Any commissions, suggestions, ideas, thoughts, submissions, comments, or replies can be left in our ask box or email addresses!]

-eric

(it is true because he is dead.)