pranešimai

presented papers

Anders Kreuger

The Content of Unconscious May be compared with an aboriginal Population in the Mind.

Sigmund Freud: 'The Unconscious', 1915 (PFL 11, p. 119)

_{santrauka (lietuviškai ir angliškai)>> /abstracts (in English and Lithuanian)>>}

Forever Lacking and Never Quite Enough is a new work by the artist Artūras Raila (b. 1962). It is an ”artist’s cut” of newsreels and short propaganda features from the 1940s, selected from the vast collections of the Lithuanian Image and Sound Archive in Vilnius. In this state-run and chronically under-financed institution, over 30.000 films are kept in precarious conditions, but all those reels contain very few frames that we today would call ”documentary”. Like its counterparts in other formerly totalitarian countries, the Lithuanian archive is a museum of the manipulated and manipulative moving image. After spending some time there, watching more than a hundred items of soft-core filmed propaganda by various political regimes, I am tempted to say that in this meticulously filed realm of mechanical reproduction the camera always lies.

Walter Benjamin usually comes to mind when a body of texts or images is composed and presented in such a way that any interpretation that goes beyond its ”aboriginal” content becomes unnecessary. I am, of course, referring to the distilled essence of compilation and re-mix on the pages of the Arcades Project, the Passagenwerk. In a sense, Raila’s most recent project can also be consumed as a self-commenting, self-referential material. It is cut and pasted to form a closed visual circuit that proves the existence of a small world, perhaps one of the smallest possible worlds, the self-image of an ethnically defined culture. I could even leave you here, alone before these rolling, circular images distilled from the mid-20th century history of one smallish European country. I am confident that you will draw the appropriate, Benjaminian conclusions from the things you see. Still, an ambitious archival undertaking like this one seems to demand a different approach. I will therefore use Raila’s film as a backdrop, and proceed to give you some background information. Behind the screened images you will no doubt feel the presence of one of the great men from another small world – the city of Vienna.

Dr. Freud lived there from the age of four to the age of eighty-two. To my knowledge, there are at least two circumstances that connect him to the geographic and historical topos that frames this presentation. The Freud family, which can be traced to 14th century Cologne, belonged to the sizeable group of Western European Jews then answering the Lithuanian Grand Duke’s invitation for skilled specialists to come and live in his newly established country. It must have been Sigmund Freud’s grandfather who, after a few hundred years, initiated the family’s move back into the German-speaking world, and the doctor himself was born in Moravia in 1856. Moreover, when the famous Yiddish Research Instutute (YIVO) was founded in Wilno (which was then in Poland) in the late 1920s, Sigmund Freud was named one of its two presidents of honour. The other one was Albert Einstein.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a multi-ethnic political entity created in the 13th century, as a result of Baltic chieftains’ resistance to repeated incursions by the Teutonic Knights and the collapse of Kievan Russia after the onslaught of the Mongols. In some ways, it was a forebear of today’s independent Republic. The Grand Duchy was a regional power in the 14th and 15th centuries and later became an integral but distinct part of the Republic of Both Nations, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth that collapsed under pressure from its increasingly powerful neighbours Austria, Prussia and Russia in the late 18th century. The concept of a Lithuanian nation defined in ethno-linguistic terms is essentially a product of the 19th century, when the territories of today’s republic, mainly inhabited by a Lithuanian-speaking peasant population, were divided between the Russian and Prussian empires. A Lithuanian national movement emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century and gained momentum after the first Russian Revolution in 1905. It became popular, and ideologically correct, to refer to the Lithuanians as the last pagans of Europe (apart, of course, from the Samis of northern Scandinavia and the Mari and Udmurt of northeastern Russia) and to Lithuanian as the most archaic of the existing Indo-European languages (with a grammar similar to that of Sanskrit or Homeric Greek).

Ethnic Lithuania was pencilled in on the European map as an independent republic in 1918, after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia and the collapse of Imperial Germany. From 1926 until the Soviet annexation in 1940, Lithuania was ruled by a home-grown authoritarian regime. Its nationalist propaganda focused on the rule of Grand Duke Vytautas The Great (1392-1430) when the Teutonic Knights were defeated and Lithuania stretched ”from the Baltics to the Black Sea.” Like most other European nations, the Lithuanians tend to measure their importance along two highly simplified parameters: whether they have, at one time or another, been able to terrorise, dominate or preferrably conquer their neighbours, and whether they can demonstrate a ”national Pantheon” of significant personalities, who may or may not be known to an educated audience in the surrounding world. On the other hand – and again probably in accordance with an unwritten European norm – Lithuanian self-consciousness is at times dangerously inclined to glorify historical victimisation. This is perhaps understandable in a small nation sandwiched between Germany and Russia, and with a complicated record of contacts to neighbouring Poland. However, neither nationalist self-assertion nor the victim complex are of much use as tools for dealing with the complex aftermath of the country’s recent history in general, and the Second World War in particular. Today, Lithuania’s priority is integration into Western political and economic structures, which means it has accepted the diktats of the wide and largely unknown surrounding world, at least in theory . . .

Raila’s film is formatted as a deceptively naive and sentimental fairy tale of a carefree rural utopia, overtaken by the unexpexted introduction of a new and ”truly free, truly independent” order (the Soviet annexation in 1940). One year later, when this plot of land is liberated for the first time, by the Third Reich, the Red Army is pictured by German filmmakers as a shabbily uniformed, undisciplined intruder swarming in (like vermin, or grasshoppers, or rats) through unidentified swamps and marshlands. As we can see, the Germans themselves always take the highways. The Bolshevik yoke is thrown off. Order is restored. Farms are re-privatised. The grateful people dances around in circles, under strict supervision. In the second liberation, after another three years, the streets of the ancient capital with many names – Wilna, Wilno, Vilne, Vilnius – are cleansed of Fascist snipers by the iron-fisted avant-garde of the Red Army. The German yoke is thrown off. Order is restored. Farms are re-collectivised. The grateful people dances around in circles, under strict supervision. The outside world may come and go, Raila’s fable seems to claim, but our small world of planters, harvesters and bee-keepers will always be the same. We will always find a way to cope. And yet – something is forever lacking and never quite enough. These are the lyrics of a traditional women’s flax-reaping song, used in one of the first sequences of the film.

Needless to say, all reference to conflicting developments on the ground has already been omitted from this black-and-white footage – by its now anonymous authors. The less than comfortable questions this imagery is bound to provoke have also been edited out; first by those who commissioned and shot the pictures, then by those who safeguarded the lengths of celluloid randomly pieced together in compliation reels, then by those who used the material for their purposes, or decided not to use it at all, to leave it unseen . . . Why was there no state-sponsored resistance the first time around, in the spring and summer of 1940, when Lithuania was overtaken by the Soviet Union as a result of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact? What was the role of the country’s Jews in the violent repressions against the pre-war bourgeois society that the Soviets carried out in the spring and early summer of 1941? And as the Germans entered the stage, what was the role of the provisional Lithuanian governement and of Lithuanian civilians in the killing of Jews, for which Lithuania, in the summer and autumn of 1941, became almost a testing-ground? On the other hand, how is the Lithuanian 16th Division of the Red Army, which participated in the Soviet re-conquest in the summer of 1944, to be judged by History? What were the dimensions of Soviet repression against Lithuanians, and the rural population in particular, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and how are we, today, to interpret the anti-Soviet guerilla resistance movement of that same period? Is it correct to use, as Lithuania does now, the term ”genocide” for all these atrocities, regardless of the victims’ or perpetrators’ nationality? And what is an appropriate usage of the term ”collaboration” throughout Lithuania’s history?

Arturas Raila’s film asks no such questions. You could say the material he uses does not recognise the jurisdiction of critical historical inquiry, since it is all fictional, in the crude sense of ”make-believe” and in the more sophisticated and etymologically more correct sense of ”something man-made, crafted or concocted”. If this is so, you may ask, why take the risk of using these film frames at all? Why allow files infected by the Propaganda Machine to enter your creative system without activating a politically acceptable anti-virus programme? I believe Raila has wanted to do something more dangerous – and perhaps much more difficult – than presenting us with a picture of Lithuania’s wartime history that could withstand scrutiny in a contemporary context of correctly posed questions and balanced answers. On the contrary, the artist seems to welcome the operational mode of the propaganda narrative into his own work – in this case it is the violence of simplifying, de-selecting and silencing actual events that characterises both Soviet and Nazi film footage. Why? Let us assume that he – just like the original film authors – never intended to tell a ”true story”. Let us also assume that he – just like people in Lithuania today – purposely avoids asking the ”right questions”. He does not want to picture historical events in themselves, and is certainly not offering any reflected judgment of ”how it really was”. His idea is rather to visually re-create people’s unreflected, ingrained and indeed almost ”automatic” reactions to the accounts of war and occupation that are traded in situations where there is little ideological control. Things that people tell to their children and grandchildren, to their neighbours and colleagues at work. Things like: ”In any case, the Germans were better than the Russians.” Or: ”Under the Germans, at least there was Order.” Or: ”I remember. When the Germans withdrew, they blew everything up.”

Raila says he dedicates this new work to a stereotypical ”older-generation viewer” in Lithuania. This means someone who is an involuntary product of a totalitarian world-order and who does not have any of the conceptual tools to deal with recent history (or current world affairs) that are taken for granted by those brought up in some of the liberal, post-modern communities further to the West. In Lithuania, there is little or no sense of the politically correct. It is simply not present as a discursive category or norm. People, even academics, who routinely talk about ”Little Jews” or keep referring to the Holocaust as “The Jewish Question” are astonished that foreigners may consider such a manner of speech anti-semitic, and nobody reacts to the wording of a poster announcing a guest-performance of ”real little Negro rappers” from Chicago in a Vilnius discotheque. But then again, we should listen to what Freud has to say, in 1915, about what he calls “the derivatives of the Unconscious”:

We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people. (PFL 11, p. 195)

However, despite all the specific facts enrolled in this parallel narrative, Lithuania can not be considered a unique case. Archival film scraps from the 1940s look roughly the same all over Europe, and the mental processes that nations project onto their social bodies do not differ all that much from country to country. In the final analysis, these images with their circular movements of pride and humiliation, with their choreographies of self-respect and self-hatred, are simply the preserved result of a mechanical reproduction process, where the outcome was determined by the technology available to state authorities of public surveillance – in other words, the newsreel industry – sixty years ago. Lithuania and its history is a point of reference, a source of evidence, a provider of individual instances for an attempt at looking into some half-hidden strata in the make-up of human communities.

I do not know whether Freud himself would have approved of being cut and pasted into a story like mine, although his later writings give plenty of leeway for applying the notion of the Unconscious – as a descriptive, dynamic and systematic category – not only to the individual human being, but also to groups of people and, implicitly, to the life of nations. Dr. Freud himself repeatedly stresses that he is first and foremost a doctor, a scientist, an empirical researcher with no license to craft an elegantly coherent theory without direct reference to verifiable observations. Times have changed, though, and now Freud seems to attract more followers as a writer than as a physician with a mission to change the world of psychiatry. I would even suggest Freud is now best studied as a writer of fiction – in the broader definition given earlier in this presentation – although this will at times be contrary to his own intentions. Freud’s writing, with its often semi-transparent use of scientific terminology and academic text composition, leave a strain of half-built structures behind. His own justification for this is, of course, always the imperative of remaining loyal to clinical experience. But perhaps the best way to use his books is to re-cycle them as literature, to enjoy his period classifications of various psychical products and to zoom in on the many circular movements he describes.

For this purpose, it seems appropriate to do a top-to-bottom reading of Freud; to start with the theoretical conclusions and gradually work your way down to the case-studies and technical instructions. I have focused on the Papers on Metapsychology first published during the First World War, and in particular The Unconscious from 1915. In this canonic text, Freud outlines three points of view for investigating psychical phenomena; the dynamic (which focuses on observing what ”happens” in different stages and different kinds of psychical activity), the topographical (which imagines different locations within the psyche and tries to pinpoint where in this system things ”take place”) and the economical (which intends to measure different intensities of energy charge or ”cathexis” in psychical processes – and ultimately to create means of regulating them). Freud summarises:

I propose that when we have succeeded in describing a psychical process in its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects, we should speak of it as a  m e t a –  p s y c h o l o g i c a l  presentation. (PFL 11, p. 184)

I now propose to apply Freud’s formula – as a compositional device – to the space-time of the Lithuanian 20th century. Perhaps Dr. Freud would approve of this tentative meta-psychological country profile after all. In any case, this is what he writes in 1920, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

(. . .) we shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which over-rides the pleasure principle. (PFL 11, p. 293)

It is precisely this compulsory, recursive logic – which goes beyond the logic of the historical events as we think we know them – that strikes me in the film frames selected and re-mixed by Arturas Raila. Forever Lacking and Never Quite Enough describes a seemingly endless and timeless series of circular movements before Power. I am, of course, tempted to read this as a reflection of a collective unconscious. Here is one more quote from what Freud writes in The Unconscious:

To sum up: e x e m p t i o n  f r o m  m u t u a l  c o n t r a d i c t i o n,  p r i m a – r y  p r o c e s s  (mobility of cathexes), t i m e l e s s n e s s  and  r e p l a c e –

m e n t  o f  e x t e r n a l  b y  p s y c h i c a l  r e a l i t y – these are the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes belonging to the system U n c o n s c i o u s. (PFL 11, p. 191)

I will try to ”illustrate” this hypothetical Lithuanian collective unconscious from the dynamic point of view by offering a short cut-out from the oeuvre of Justinas Marcinkevičius (b. 1936), a Lithuanian poet who always knew how to tell the right story and phrase the right questions, and therefore has a firmly established reputation for poetic and patriotic decorum – no matter what political regime is sponsoring his undertakings. The excerpts come from his historical verse drama Mindaugas, published in 1968 when Lithuania was just one of fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics. Mindaugas was the first and only Lithuanian king, who was crowned and then assasinated in the mid-13th century.

How can I pull together Lithuania

            now,

When in everybody’s heart

           she is so different?

(. . .)

Perhaps you need to fashion and create

            perpetually, your Fatherland

To re-create and fashion it anew?

For if you pause and stop one single moment –

            It will die.

The brief historical background given above should help us to perform an attentive reading of Marcinkevičius’s standard-issue poetics and Raila’s banal newsreel footage. Both enunciations are essentially untranslatable. It is more than difficult to fully convey and clarify their informational or emotive content in a foreign cultural surrounding. But at the same time they are so recognisable, so general, so faceless. What happens here, near the heart of Lithuanian cultural sentimentality, could happen almost anywhere. It is only the distributional pattern of events and their interpretations that marks the Lithuanian material off as specific. The actual elements of such a discourse – many fights, a few victories, quite a few defeats – are common goods, and the underlying objective is shared by most human communities: to protect and preserve your own kind and to feel proud of yourself at the end of the day. The points of view borrowed from Freud should help us tune in to the dynamism of the constant shifts between self-protection and self-assertion that characterise this people’s interpretation of its own fate. I have tried to highlight the problematic distribution of revolt and collaboration throughout Lithuania’s history. In Raila’s film, this dynamism is subdued, and we see more of submission than of stubborn resolve. But even in these film frames, there is an abundance of half-hidden little references to a more dynamic state of affairs. The embroidered badges saying Lietuva (”Lithuania”) stitched onto the woolen sleeves of the young men drafted by the Germans. The ”national" works of art that mix so well with imported German and Russian artefacts. The wooded horizons that will always be ours, whatever happens to us . . .

In this context, Freud’s topographical point of view is perhaps most useful if interpreted literally. I have already tried to map some of the various displacements – in time as well as in space – that mark Lithuania’s topography of self-identification. Here, it may be enough to remind you that any topography also entails toponymy. Some place-names stay put on the map long after the circumstances that created them have changed. Words referring to bodies of water – the so-called hydronymica – form a particularly conservative, and therefore reliable group. The names of rivers and lakes in present-day Belarus and Western Russia – even as far East as the outskirts of Moscow – testify to the earlier presence of Baltic tribes in an area much larger than today. The names and locations of countries, on the other hand, are much easier to re-arrange. Lithuania has, in the course of the last two-and-a-half centuries, been identified by abbreviations as divergent as WXL (in Polish), LSSR (in Russian) and LTU (in English). In the life of this nation, however, topography is rarely used to jump borders, enlarge territories or widen horizons. More often than not, it is the province of a localist and ethnocentric ideology. Some Lithuanians seem to have embarked on a quest for the smallest possible world, a mono-linguistic, monological, physically and psychically graspable entity. Perhaps what they are hoping to find in such a utopian microcosm is the safest possible world, where the recursive blows of Raila’s film will never be inflicted upon them again.

This summer, when I was doing research for the Self-esteem project, which is still being shown in this building, I came across a little book that for me summarised this whole topographical dimension. 100 Native Region Experts is published by the Native Region Study Association (an amateur ethnographical society) in Vilnius, 2001. It contains a hundred authentic but idealised biographies – almost hagiographies – of people who in various ways contribute to the fashioning and creation of that fabled country, the Fatherland. Against this frightening backdrop of moving images, black-and-white, good and evil, all of them smaller than life, I cannot resist reading out one of these lives:

Antanas Kakanauskas

Born on February 9, 1955 in Dubėnai (the district of Kelmė), he had to do without the warmth of his parents throughout his childhood. Grew up in children's homes at Smalininkai, Laurai, Dabikinė, Saugai. Therefore sees the whole of Lithuania as his native region and his real home.

Studied at the Panevėžys Pedagogical School of Music, and took a degree from the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute. Worked as a teacher in Samainiai (district of Zarasai), Virbalis, Šakiai and Luokė. Studied journalism, as an extern, at Vilnius University. Worked in newspapers in the districts of Plungė and Mažeikiai, as a member of the editorial board of ”The Farmer’s Counsellor”, as a tourism instructor and in heritage protection.

Has been living in Telšiai for the last ten years. Is raising two daughters, Monika and Simona, together with his wife Elė. A very enthusiastic traveller. In 1984, he and Vytautas Kryžanauskas travelled through the whole of Lithuania (a trip of more than 1.500 kilometres) in 45 days. Has amassed thousands of photographs and slides.

Writes a lot about people, their lives and fates. Writes poetry, and ecourages other literary writers in Samogitia, his region. Unsurpassed as a crossword-constructor for the ”Native Region” magazine, where he also contributes articles about cultural monuments and events in the Telšiai surroundings and to which he regularly forwards his friends’ poems, for the ”readers’ own” column.

But what about the third of Freud’s parameters? How can I try to describe the unconscious, and therefore un-describable, strata of the Lithuanian psyche from an economical point of view? Again, this is surprisingly simple and straightforward. The economic parameter in itself is a category of measurability, an instrument of quantification. Freud seems to have deviced it for comparing different workloads of psychical energy in different provinces of the Self – the so-called cathexes (which to me seems a fairly clumsy English translation of the German Besetzungen). As we know from many fields of human life, quantification almost invariably develops into regulation. The archetypal arena of quantification and regulation is, of course, human language.

Articulation is a notion I find particularly fruitful for discussions about language, art, society and politics. Not only does it give a precise technical description of the act of fashioning and forwarding a message, it also leads us deep into the prehistory of creation, expression, communication and legislation. One translation of the Latin articulare is ”to joint together, to connect by joints into a series”. Something articulated is something which is structured in such a way that its constituent parts are discernible, could be detached from each other and put back together in a different order. But this word can be traced further back into a reconstructed Indo-European past. There seems to have existed a root *ar, which signified both ”creation” and ”rule”, both ”art” and ”law”. And is not Dr. Freud hinting at the same thing in The Ego and the Id, in 1923, when he effectively says that the Conscious is articulated, whereas the Uncounscious is not? I quote:

The question “How does a thing become conscious?” would (. . .) be more advantageously stated: “How does a thing become pre-conscious?” And the answer would be: “Through becoming connected with the word-presentations corresponding to it.” (PFL 11, p. 358)

Just to keep in mind that articulation is not restricted to spoken or written language, I also read you another comment, added by Freud a bit further down in the same text. As a matter of fact, I think it is of particular interest against the backdrop of Arturas Raila’s film:

Thinking in pictures is (. . .) only a very incomplete form of being conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. (PFL 11, p. 359)

Now, it so happens that I have a very illustrative example of how my stipulated Lithuanian collective Unconscious can be understood from a perspective which is regulatory and economical in a very straightforward way. Human language is of course much, much more than a means of communication. Among other things, the language of a community that defines itself ethnically is a mark of specificity, an instrument of self-identification and a source of both pride and concern. Correct articulation is the only measure that can protect the national language, which is perceived as being under constant threat. Not only is articulation Law – it also has to be protected by Law. Some nations have taken the full consequences of this, and established an official agency for language regulation. Lithuania is one of them. The State Lithuanian Language Commission establishes legally binding guidelines for correct language usage, and its sub-division the State Lithuanian Language Inspection controls the implementation of this regulatory framework and administers an economic punishment to those who transgress it.

I will end my presentation with a few Benjaminian, self-commenting quotes from a contemporary legal document. § 911-917 of the Rule of Court Concerning Failure to Comply with the Law of Public Administration of the Republic of Lithuania, promulgated on February 17, 2000, stipulate the following cases of language abuse, which lead to fines of between 300 and 1.500 litas. This is the equivalent of between 75 and 350 US dollars, in an economy where a normal monthly salary is between 150 and 250 US dollars. I quote:

1. Failure to use the State Language on the seals, stamps, forms or signs of enterprises, institutions or organisations.

2. Failure to use the State Language in the names and descriptions of goods and services produced in the Republic of Lithuania, or in the instructions for goods sold in Lithuania.

3. Failure to comply with decisions adopted by the State Lithuanian Language Commission of the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania or to implement instructions issued by officials at the Language Inspection of the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania.

4. Failure to use the State Language while performing duties (according to your certified language competence category) in State organs of power or administration, as well as in enterprises, institutions or organisations.

5. Failure to use the State Language for office purposes in enterprises, institutions or organisations and for their correspondence within the country.

6. Presentation of documents in languages other than the State Language.

7. Failure to translate TV or Radio programmes, as well as films on TV, video and in cinema theatres, into the State Language.

8. Failure to use authentic and official forms of Lithuanian place-names in legal acts, in other official publications, on maps, on street-signs, on public signs, on stamps, in communications, in the documentation of goods produced in Lithuania or in text-books.