Ethnographic surreality, possession and the unconscious

Abstract

In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, issued by André Breton in 1929, surrealism was described as “a total recuperation of our psychic strength by a means of none other than vertiginous descent into ourselves, systematic illumination of the hidden places and progressive darkening of the other places, a perpetual walk in the forbidden zone”. Surrealism sought to represent the unconscious and forbidden zones of the psyche, of the body, of the noumenal world within, which offered access, for surrealists, to energies and intuitions repressed by “civilized” modes of perception. For Jean Rouch, the significance of surrealism, of automatic writing and ciné‐transe, rested in the potential escape they offered from the formal constraints of conventional film and of conventional perception and observation. In his celebration of ciné‐transe, and of the technological apparatus that makes it possible, it is possible to detect his desire for a freeing‐up of the constraints of consciousness—a desire to “write with the body”, to dream, to tap the unexplored power of the unconscious in its overturning of “reality”, of system, and of convention. As a phaneroscopic “wide‐angle lens”, surreality aimed to document the scientifically unexplainable, the immense experiential overload of ritual possession. It attempted to make visible, in the movement between observation and participation and across disjunctive points of view; the crossings‐over into the unconscious world by which possessed Songhay dancers gained access to powers of phaneroscopic perception. By adopting filmic techniques which follow the surrealist practice of creating “verbal and visual collage”, in which randomly‐generated images, emerging out of a trance‐like state (of “automatic writing” or "ciné‐transe"), are juxtaposed in indeterminate and polyphonic relations with each other in an attempt to disturb or destroy patterns of perception which are confining, rationalistic, linear, or restricted to conscious phenomena, Rouch believed he could create powerful representations of the unknowable. This paper relates the phaneroscopic practice of ethnographic surrealism to psychoanalytic models of the unconscious. In a discussion of Rouch's interpretation of the Hauka spirit cult in his film Les Maîtres Fous, the paper argues that the neo‐Freudian paradigm which allowed him to depict the Sohghay's weekend Hauka rites as a parodic reversion to “savagery” (which both reversed the hierarchy of colonizer/colonized and enabled participants to experience a therapeutic release from the traumas of colonization) has been challenged by Lacanian and post‐Lacanian “re‐readings” of Freud that call into question the extent to which the unconscious can be equated with a pre‐linguistic state characterized by disjunctive “primitive” and “instinctive” energies. The surrealist longing for a rupture of the symbolic order of Western rationalism and a return to the “imaginary order” of the unconscious is confounded in the Lacanian conception of the unconscious as a zone inhabited by the “discourse of the Other”. However, the work of Gillès Deleuze and Félix Guanari [1977] provides a means of conceptualizing the unconscious in terms that avoid simplistic binary logic (phenomenon/noumenon; signifier/signified; subject/object; conscious/unconscious; civilization/savagery). The unconscious is not the “unrepresentable” Other of consciousness; it is a schizophrenic phaneron, a signifying “machine”, a transgressive producer of “group fantasy”. Rejecting both Freud's Oedipal model (the unconscious as primal imagery or “ghostly signifieds"), and the Lacanian notion of the unconscious (as a play of “empty signifiers"). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious cannot be accounted for in terms of the individual child and its entry into language any more than it can be conceived of as the domain of the primitive. On the contrary, the unconscious is constituted as “group fantasy”, as collective public memory which need not be reduced to elemental (Oedipal) signifiers: “all delirium possesses a world‐historical, political and racial content”. The schizophrenic embodies the public nature of unconscious meaning, since schizophrenia is primarily a communication disorder in which an individual never sees himself in terms of a linguistically‐generated “selfhood”, and fails to adopt the “false” identity which is offered to him in the language of the Other. Schizophrenia is characterized by a refusal to treat some meanings as superior to others, to remain within the bounds of a stable identity, or to distinguish between material (noumenal) things and actions and their (phenomenal) meanings. The schizophrenic unconscious treats all experience as signs, registering language in the same way as the body registers physical stimuli. Thus “meanings in the unconscious are simply meanings as workings of the body” [Harland 1987:174–175]. The schizophrenic as a model for the unconscious holds several implications for those interested in representing the experiential power of public rituals, for the public meanings in circulation during such rituals are material and noumenal, and are registered on the bodies of the dancers as they transgress boundaries and pass beyond consciousness. Rouch's surreality attempted to inscribe this unconscious production of public meaning as it was manifested in the movements of the ritual and in the movements of the camera‐body.

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