nausea and seduction

JILIN CITY, China — Tian Lihua was just beginning her morning shift when she felt a wave of nausea, then numbness in her limbs and finally dizziness that gave way to unconsciousness. In the days that followed, more than 1,200 fellow employees at the textile mill where Ms. Tian works would be felled by these and other symptoms, including convulsions, breathing difficulties, vomiting and temporary paralysis.

“When I finally came to, I could hear the doctors talking but I couldn’t open my eyes,” she said weakly from a hospital bed last month. “They said I had a reaction to unknown substances.” -from this article by Andrew Jacobs for the NY Times

ON a recent evening, an unusual experiment took place at a lounge in downtown Manhattan. Nine blindfolded women were asked to determine, by smell alone, whether any among a group of nine men was worth pursuing.

Three men had just showered using a body wash with synthesized pheromones, three had used a body wash without pheromones, and the rest had worked up a sweat and not washed at all. They then rubbed their arms on scent strips, and handed them to the women to sniff. -from this article by Camille Sweeney for the NY Times

And in more architectural news, White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters.

past, present, future

A couple of paragraphs from this article, Enlightenment Therapy, by Chip Brown:

" What darkness is to psychoanalysis, light is to Zen. In pursuit of mystic illumination, “the vast ocean of dazzling light,” Zen is cheerfully unconcerned with the manufacture and distribution of personal meaning. It tends to discount the authority of the unconscious and to ignore the significance of dreams. Students are discouraged from delving into the content of emotions. Where psychoanalysis is keen to unpack a patient’s past — especially those aspects of the past that distort perception in the present — Zen dwells on awareness in the present. This! Here! Now! Zen masters have been known to whack students with a stick.

It’s no surprise that such an unlikely pair got off to a rocky start. For decades the feeling of being “one” with the universe, prized in Zen as an attribute of enlightenment, was belittled by many psychoanalysts as an “infantile regression.” By the same token, the injunction “know thyself,” the ultimate chocolate-cherry in the candy box of Western wisdom, was brushed off by Zen adherents as a delusion. What’s to know about a conceit that has no fixed reality and more often than not is an impediment to experiencing Buddha nature? The self, as one Rinzai teacher put it bluntly, “is a malignant growth which is to be surgically removed.” "

-Chip Brown for New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2009
(again, full article here)

nothing to be afraid of?

"No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of. "- Walter, in The Big Lebowski

While reading (on Wikipedia) about Freud's death drive, some things come up that resonate and loop in mysterious ways, both in terms of my current and previous research, and with life in general- but I suspect this might just be the magic of psychoanalytic theory. I seem to see meaningful (and not so meaningful) connections everywhere these days... so bear with me. Also I should mention that I will write about ether soon/eventually- rather than just contemplate it inside.

Back to the Death Drive.

Also referred to as the 'death instinct', (translation issues from German apparently), the human death drive is described as "the drive towards death, destruction, and non-existence."

Freud's Pleasure Principle puts forth that the human condition is predicated upon the maximization of pleasure and the avoidance of pain (id). Its mature counterpart, his Reality Principle, is what "compels one to defer instant gratification when necessary because of the obstacles of reality" (ego). Together, these 'instincts' can embody and explain human life and self-preservation, from birth to death.

From what I can tell, Freud's theory of the death drive, this idea that there exists an uncontrollable force within being that strives "to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state" (doesn't this kind of echo a famous scientific law?- that one DM uses to preface Heterotopias?), is meant to account for human behavior that, on the surface, run counter to his two principles. For example, sadism and masochism are not easily reconciled with neither the pleasure nor reality principle- they seem to oppose the drive for pleasure and coherence. They (and other human impulses of various scales and intensities) point toward our darker side.

*Wikipedia for all of the death drive information and quotes- the page can be accessed through the first link.

Strange connection 1:
Venus in Furs (1870), novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (after whom masochism is named), is rife with fragrance and odor, richly described by submissive protagonist. The scents reflect his forbidden affair with mistress as it begins, peaks and descends. Smells form a major dimension of the story (fantasy, erotism/eroticism, memory). see p140 of Gilbert.

Strange connection 2:
I've been meaning to lead this whole archive/death drive thing elliptically (potentially through Carolyn Steedman's writing on Archive Fever- with this little bit I recall about literal illness and death from researching in archives) to a discussion of smells of decay and decomposition. Material reality/natural evolutionary intent of bad odors seem to align with our culture's desire to forget/dismiss/deny mortality and death. Possible digressions into attitudes towards death and dying, illness, funeral rites... spirituality, immortality (immortality by kundera??), which ties into memory, remembrance, looping back to smell and instinct?

Strange connection 3:
from death drive wikipedia page linked to above:
On the origins of the death drive theory: "subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact these traumatic experiences, a phenomenon that Freud called repetition compulsion."

from my M1 notes, May 22, 2007:
“a word (archive) can never be a beginning but rather is always a mark of the empty place between a thing and its representation." (Steedman, Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, p6)

archive. Psychoanalysis
desire for origins
Freud – compulsion to repeat is the drive toward death. (end of M1 notes)

Am I driven towards death? Does this explain my fascination with archives? Also why I repeat my mistakes? (And by me, I pretty much mean all of us, everyone.)

Strange connection 4:
Lacan- Why do I have at least 3 books on my shelf on him? What originally prompted me to order them from the library? They are right next to a whole slew of books by/on Zizek... things it might have been about- perversion, voyeurism, desire, the other, the shadow- might've been during night and unconscious period? or maybe while reading up on Hejduk? all seem related somehow. privacy, trespass, boundary...

Strange connection 5:
Finally, to explain the opening image, the movie The Big Lebowski (definitely in Top 5) flashed through my mind when I first read the definition of death drive. I thought of the German nihilists first, though I see now that Freud can explain very well the motivations of The Dude and his fellow characters. I'm not sure why nihilism sprang to mind- maybe it was the "non-existence" bit... I googled nihilism and death drive and found two articles that look interesting:

Autodestruction and Nonexistence: Two Distinct Aspects of the Death Drive, (1986)
by Uri Lowental, M.D.

The Life Death Drives, (2007)
by Yazar Cengiz Erdem

The first article begins with this quotation:

"Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being that is the corpse. The form of nothingness — a fear that someday one ceases to be. As one grows older one pays more and more attention to the second, material side of death. Nonbeing is infinite emptiness…. It is no coincidence that all poems about death depict it as a journey, but the journey is in vain. When his ride is done, they find him in bed and bang his head on the threshold." -M. Kundera (1981)

Though it doesn't state in the citation, I have a feeling this passage is from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting... (this article confirms it! I'll double check in the book later) all I can say is, strange... Under pressure that day when we first met as a group, I chose this book to be in my top 5. I read it years ago. I don't even remember what it's about. I do remember that it made me feel both sad and hopeful, conflicted, confused... Why did its title emerge that day? I'm not sure if it'd be in my top 5 the day before or after, or if we had had a lot of time to think and assess, peruse titles and options. In any case, another strange connection.

Or maybe this just shows that my interests are too narrow and aligned, the way everything hooks up sort of neatly? Or that the realm of this thesis is too broad, if anything and everything fits in? I really need to find a way to focus/organize/ steer myself in one direction. Am I straying too far from scent?

death drive

On Monday I went to Macondo Books, this terrific used bookstore I used to go to all of the time as a teenager. I bought three books:

Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte
(nice images - I figure one day I will deal in images again)

The Volcano Lover, by Susan Sontag
(hot eruptions? historical romance?? susan sontag??? need I imagine more?)

13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, by William T. Vollmann
(interesting sounding author mentioned by Donald at 1st rehab, so I had my eyes out. Finding one with a first chapter entitled The Ghost of Magnetism, and a last chapter called The Grave of Lost Stories, I felt very lucky)

* * *

I started M1 in May of 2007. I was happy to be in Montreal, feeling weightless after eight months of Toronto winter and soul-killing office work. In love and seeing everything with bright eyes, I had no idea what to do for my thesis – the goal was to escape. (Yes, it’s funny that I find myself now desperately trying to escape my escape. Is this all we do, run in circles?) In class, forced to say something, anything, to my peers and professor, I improvised vague interest in doing a national archive for Vietnam, the country of my origin. It feels strange to write that – the country of my origin. But it also feels too distant to say, Vietnam, the country of my parents’ origin. One feels like a lie, or at least a fiction; and the other, a cold hard fact with no friction.

Either way, it didn’t fit. I suppose I thought that by delving into the past of this faraway country, this idea across the world, I’d kill two birds with one stone. What was it that I wanted to probe? The meaning and fallibility of origins? The strengths and weaknesses of cultural identity? What is an archive anyway, how does it work? What does it mean, to archive? What roles do memory and objects (and the memory held in objects) have in the construction of cultural history? In the construction of the self, of personal identity? How does this culture pass itself on, procreate, recreate itself generation to generation? How did this even relate to architecture? I had no clue. I won’t go into the superficial reasons why this plan fell apart. I'll just say that in the end, I was not reborn. There was no deeper connection to my amputated cultural past. (I had imagined roots surpassing myself, growing towards Vietnamese soil!) I did not finally feel whole. My parents did not love me more. And I still didn’t have a thesis, or even a passable proposition for one.

Along the way I did learn a bit (not enough) about Vietnam. It seems like a beautiful country with a completely fucked up history. But that’s sort of like describing someone as “complex,” as if that’s worth noting – aren’t we all complicated messy people with dirt in our pasts? The origins of most nations were bloody and cruel, their survival filled with death, lies, and violence. As far as recent history goes though, and of course this means history that America has had its hand in, it is a particularly interesting and devastating story. A story that I’m sure would touch anyone who knew of it, not only the children of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants.

In researching in my typical free-form, grab anything, sort of way, I came across Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. I liked the title and impressiveness of its author enough to buy the book. Archive. Fever. It was much too difficult for me to understand – I knew that. But I found its difficulty seductive and I still believe that, one day, I might be ready to tread past the Preamble.

An excerpt:
“It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivation implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make it into a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it cannot necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight that imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise.” (Derrida, Archive Fever, p29)

To be continued.

vomiting in public

A peculiar thing happened recently. A few weeks ago, when I was going through a rather turbulent (both exciting and anxious) patch, I was overcome with nausea. I was at my desk at school, just back from dinner. I don’t usually vomit. In fact I remember trying to remember, in that moment, the last time I threw up without alcohol being involved. But I couldn't. I recall recalling that I’m not the kind of person with a weak stomach, that I don’t have the type of body that expels its contents easily. Walking, half running, to the school bathroom I was thinking about the absurdity of it all as my stomach pushed at my throat, begging for its release.

Vomiting, blushing, sneezing, coughing, crying, smiling- these are the remnants of our instincts. These are the external actions we do not own and activate willingly. (too untrue to say like that?) Of course there is urination, defecation, and the passing of gas- but these we can somewhat control, at least for the majority of our lives. Crocodile tears and alligator smiles… It’s interesting that we use animal imagery to describe such distinctly human behavior. When was the last time you ran in fear for your life? Or had to stalk and kill your meal?

[By the way, today I saw a bird of prey (falcon/hawk/eagle?) kill a pigeon mid-flight, swoop down to pick it up in its talons a second after it hit the ground, dead! Needless to say, it was amazing.]

Our human lives, through thousands of years of evolution and progress, have developed into existences of relative comfort and convenience. Safe and secure in our warm houses, we shiver at the thought that bad things do happen, that hardship actually exists, that life can be precious and precarious. We rely on the hope that ‘they’ (crime, hate, violence) will not, cannot, happen to us (and also the ominous having less/lacking wants). We feel content (do we?) that we only have to fear the simulated emotion and artificial friendliness of our peers. Seeking authenticity but largely unable to judge.

Andy Warhol, famed queer pop artist and entrepreneur, lived as big as he made and created as much as he consumed. He showed us that we can and do exist somewhere between life and art, reality and fiction/image, production and reproduction… proved that the lines we’ve drawn around ourselves can be pushed, obliterated, and redrawn at any moment. In any case, he was and continues in his death to be a mythic figure. It is interesting that he was very aware of his day-to-day memories and their containment for future recollection. He sought to keep them by preserving smells.

“My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn’t start wearing lots of them until the early 60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn’t get lost forever.” (A. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), p.151)

Was his scent museum a way to preserve his personal self/ private identity? Was it something for only him to have and know intimately as his life became increasingly public and his image the territory of others? Was it simply another instance of his interest in the mundane and banal, discarded and forgotten? Or was it a narcissistic show for posterity, a part of his legacy-in-the-making? Perhaps a little bit of both? Are we all like this, roaming between our private and public selves, our past and possible futures, looking for meaning in the incidental? (or should it be looking to separate significant from irrelevant, distilling them from one another?)

Smell scientist Avery Gilbert has this to say on the more technical side:
“Memories fade and get harder to find amid the mental clutter of a busy life. For a given smell, the odds that it will produce a riveting flashback shrink with each resniffing. That special scent becomes less special, its links to the past grow steadily weaker. Warhol’s solution was ingenious: he would wear a cologne until it built up strong emotional connections, then retire it to his personal smell museum. Once out of active rotation, the cologne’s memories were locked in, never to be confused with others. The Warhol wear-and-retire method was unusual but effective. By not switching back and forth between scents, he avoided the loss of memorablility that psychologists call interference.” (Gilbert, p. 205)

Interference in psychology can be described as the following:
“A prominent theory of forgetting at the behavioral level is anchored in the phenomenon of interference, or inhibition, which can be either retroactive or proactive. In retroactive inhibition, new learning interferes with the retention of old memories; in proactive inhibition, old memories interfere with the retention of new learning. Both phenomena have great implications for all kinds of human learning.” From Encyclopedia Britannica, online here.

Inhibition:
from the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. The action of inhibiting or forbidding; a prohibition (with reference to some act expressed or implied), esp. one formally issued by a person or body possessed of civil or ecclesiastical authority.
2. The action of preventing, hindering, or checking. Now esp. in Physiol.
3. Psychol. A voluntary or involuntary restraint or check that prevents the direct expression of an instinctive impulse; also colloq., in looser use, an inner hindrance to conduct or activity.

And from Wikipedia:

“Social inhibition is a conscious or unconscious constraint or curtailment by a person of a process or behaviour that the person may consider objectionable in a social setting. Inhibitions can serve necessary social functions, reducing or preventing certain antisocial impulses from being acted on. Inhibitions vary greatly from person to person, and may be closely linked to a person's confidence. An extreme lack of inhibition may be antisocial and a symptom of a mental disorder, such as hypomania and mania. On the other hand, a high level of inhibition may also create personal problems, including an inability to feel or express certain emotions.”

The same scents smell different on different people. The individuality of our bodies, our skin oils and sweat and personal odor, mix with the bottled perfume to produce a unique fragrance that is inimitable day to day, hour to hour. Perfumes are designed and created, for the most part, with a structure that can be likened to a pyramid. This pyramid expresses both the character and time of the perfume. The top notes, at the pyramid’s peak, are the most striking scents- the notes you notice and recognize first. These notes, also called head notes, are the most fleeting and are the first to disappear with time. The middle notes are next in line, propping up the top notes. Also referred to as heart notes, these linger beyond top notes. Base notes are the foundation of a fragrance, serving to carry the scent and give it its lasting essence. These three notes together form what is called an accord. (give examples of typical notes, elaborate, etc)

A beautiful (successful?) accord is very elusive and when found, can bring a perfumier much fame. See Chanel No. 5. Presently, the perfume industry seems to depend more upon marketing and celebrity cache than the design of the actual fragrance. (elaborate)

One fashion house, Comme des Garcons, is refreshingly daring and (post?)modern in the construction of their perfumes. Often referred to as “anti-fragrances”, their work plays with and interprets candidly notions of beauty and desire, amongst other ideas.

See the following online reviews of some of their fragrances:

Comme des Garcons, reviewed by fragrantica.com
8 88, reviewed by hintmag.com
Odeur 53, reviewed by The Independent