Ars Electronica is a “cultural, educational and scientific institute” founded in 1979 and based in the state capital of Upper Austria, Linz. They organise a yearly “Festival for Art, Technology and Society”. This year the tagline of the Ars Electronica Festival was “hope-who will turn the tide” and it featured a complex program of over 300 pages with installations, concerts, performances – all centred around applications of new technologies. Linz is located on the Danube, just like Vienna, but around 200 km upstream. The small city counts around 200,000 inhabitants and therefore over 100,000 visitors to the four-day festival were an exceptional happening. My research group consisting of four psychoanalysts and I partook at the Church of Ignorance (choi) with a panel discussion and a lecture. The choi was one event of the festival which was housed at the DH5, a cultural and social hub.
The small city was vibrating with parallel events on this last summer weekend, all related to Ars Electronica in some way. Upon arrival there was a big international crowd swarming the streets and cafés as the festival had venues all over the city, indoors and outdoors. We also noticed a lot of “nope” tags obviously proclaiming a counter position next to the posters advertising the festival. We found ourselves in an admittedly unusual cooperation between a mainstream event and its critical voices.
I wanted to see for myself before judging, so I visited the main building called the Ars Electronica building. There was an interactive virtual model of the world showing which oceans had how much microplastic swimming in the water; there was a detailed 3-D projection of a zone of the Alps where one could browse the angles the sun fell in during the according seasons and you could go back in time various decades to see how the snowline was retreating on the glaciers; there was a map of the world with little lights indicating the level of respective emissions of every country. It was pretty impressive to see the progress of technology, highlighted by the contrast to the black-and-white pictures on the wall showing inventions from the Vienna Wolrd’s Fair in 1873. There was a line waiting to try the brain interface where kids were drawing on a computer with their brain power. I am not quite sure how that worked but I did not wait, instead, I took a test which was meant to broach the ethical problems of self-driving cars. It turned out to be a sadistic caricature of an ethical discussion framed as triage, as it made me chose exclusively between the group of affected victims in a car crash scenario. For example, if I preferred old people to die or fat people, young ones or males, etc. There were recycled and renewable – those seemingly magical words of our time – materials on display, and fabric made of mycelium, and they proved that “Haute Couture” could be achieved using these.
I understood the nope.
Nope! To technology fuelling the fantasy of maintenance of the status quo: we do not need to change anything, technology will enable us to go on as we do. The interactive models were pretty, but there was no place for the questions: why is there so much microplastic and what are the ideas to change it? Is there technology perhaps we could develop for this cause? Why is the continent of Africa so dark when looked at through its emissions? Does “the West” have the right to impede their economic growth? What are possible solutions to the alignment problem with A.I. and automatisation? We cannot just use the human factor for choices that need somebody to be held accountable for. Do we really care to maintain elitist cultures? Don’t we have bigger fish to fry? Hope has a tranquillizing and sedating effect with great power of disavowal: everything is changing, but we will not have to change, we will not lose anything. Hope used as a placebo.
In this context, I much enjoyed the Church of Ignorance which put forward a critique of the festival on many levels and called for a different, less superficial, approach.
About 20 years ago, the German director Christoph Schlingensief presented a project called the Church of Fear taking a critical position towards institutions and figures of authority spreading fear. There are a couple of physical church buildings spread around Germany, but the idea was not material at its core. Some activists emphasise that this artistic intervention focuses on not letting fear be instrumentalised to influence the population – a very hot topic these days as well, with the American presidential elections coming up, and, on a local scale, we also have parliamentary elections in Austria on September 29th. The discourse in our post-Covid times centres around fear. Activists of the Church of Fear call out a radical acceptance of fear: “we will not let anyone take our fear” and, “do not fear fear!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR61PnHd3zs Sept. 2024)
In Ireland, Peter Rollins founded the Church of Contradiction, with a more philosophical and definitely also Lacanian orientation, but it seems to be related to this idea.
The Church of Ignorance is inspired by the Schlingensief’s project formulating its position: “It finds techniques that counteract the general anger and depression caused by the increasingly overwhelming sense of powerlessness (Ohnmacht), thus providing support and cohesion. In the School of Ignorance, we examine the relationship of logic to the world and how to deal with ambivalence” – because technology and progress do not give us all the answers. Hope is not a viable answer to ambivalence. In the place of an answer, it appears to distract from the confrontation with choice and loss.
At the choi event, which also lasted four days, the sociologist Lindsay McGoey spoke about ignorance studies – “an interdisciplinary field focused on exploring how strategic ignorance and the will to ignore have underpinned economic exchange and political domination throughout history”. The Austrian performance groups Fuckhead and Haider, Terror Trenk did a procession through the city demonstrating their uproar and anger. There was pole-sitting, there were punk concerts, lectures and workshops. Here is the program if you want to delve into it: https://dh5.space/#programmchoi
Yes, there is room for psychoanalysis in the midst of this. My colleagues and I focused on non-knowledge, namely the unconscious in our contributions.
In his discovery of the unconscious, Freud had to dismiss the idea that uncovering the missing link, getting to the cause of the problems of a patient, would solve them. The praxis of psychoanalysis could be more of a “church of ignorance” – always directed towards what is not known, what is not being said, what is not being understood, as well as that which does not fit. The glitch. It is not about finding a master who tells you what is right and what is wrong and tranquillises your discomfort. It is generally not about finding a culprit or about simply making it go away. A symptom is an indication of something, not just a personal problem that needs to disappear. You might notice the difference of the psychoanalytic approach to how psychiatrists approach mental health. Psychoanalysis has difficulty to fit into positivistic sciences. There are psychoanalytic concepts in the natural sciences, yes, but the psychoanalytic discourse is something else. I think it is important to note that natural sciences have a hard time proving causality – it is impossible to rule out unknown factors, therefore the sciences focus on correlations and falsifiable statements. The psychoanalyst’s position is also an ethical decision: What is best for the patient cannot be answered with all the experience of an analyst – this would be normative, seeing the patient as a psychological object, not as a split subject. If the analyst gives direct answers to the patient’s questions instead of letting the non-knowledge and the unconscious unfold, it clogs desire which is a most powerful force. We can hope to mobilise the desire of the analysand during an analysis or to unclog it. As
Freud said, the aim of psychoanalysis could be to transform “neurotic misery into common unhappiness” (Breuer, Freud, 1893–1895/1955, p. 305). Or as I sometimes say: into uncommon happiness. It can be one outcome of psychoanalysis. It is humble, it is not shiny and it is no placebo. Some say pessimistic but we cannot account for more because the Other of the Other, something or someone giving a guarantee, does not exist. God can take on the function of guarantee in some societies, but this is an illusion. Today, we often find natural science in this place (Slovos, 2017; Zupančič, 2024). Science dictates the right way to nurture yourself, the best to approach girls, how to structure your day most efficiently. But you see, the questions of the subject are not answered by this, the discomfort persists, although the tranquillising/sedating effect may do something, but it is not enough. The revelation of the illusion became palpable during the pandemic: suddenly, nobody was reliable for answers: neither scientists nor governments could guarantee safety. It was a real event. This gives rise to a longing for a complete Other, and consequently, we have the rise of conspiracy ideas, identity politics, and so on. The Other of these discourses is complete – in turn, it splits society. The discontent of our society – das Unbehagen in der Kultur – is not the conflict with prohibitions and the wish for the forbidden as in Freud’s society, we much more often encounter the misery of not incarnating the ideal. It also shows in the capitalist discourse that operates in our society today: we hunt after the object of satisfaction. The object does not only promise to fill the lack, it also anchors our identity, our self, because it represents the sexy man, the beautiful girl, whatever. If you do not comply, if you do not enjoy it, you are attacked by your own super ego for being lazy, not worth it, abnormal etc. You see, consuming the object, or becoming a perfect object, seems more important than following your desire and dealing with subjectivity and the limits of omnipotency.
This was a summary of my contribution to the Church of Ignorance. We had a panel discussion about the crucial role of non-knowledge in psychoanalytic pedagogy arguing that embracing non-knowledge is a prerequisite for acquiring true knowledge (by Sebastian Baryli), about how dreams function as a pathway to the unconscious while simultaneously obscuring it, suggesting that dreams are a manifestation of unconscious desires and a form resistance to knowledge (by Amelie Zadeh). There was an exploration of Freud‘s and Lacan‘s concept of perversion in relation to knowing and not-knowing (by Jasmin Kargin), and a more in-depth discussion of the weird and revenant conceptualisation of the unconscious by Lacan (by Klaus Doblhammer).
It may seem strange to resort to Freud and psychoanalysis in the midst of these modern and acute problems I discussed at the beginning of this article. This is due to the reception psychoanalysis has had and also due to some of its developments after Freud. The stereotype of the old man sitting behind the couch not saying anything, being like a stone wall, or making “your mum” interpretations, is funny and, of course, it has it’s truth to it. But do not throw out the baby with the bathwater: psychoanalysis has a radical potential for including non-knowledge and dealing with it. I am not saying psychoanalysis is a superior discourse – of course, it cannot contribute to tackle our climate problems, for example, as the sciences may. Nor is it the only way to deal with non-knowledge, but we have practised it for over a hundred years and its models may be useful for other disciplines and projects. Concepts of psychoanalysis may enable us to formulate problems more specifically, taking into account for example the complicated role of jouissance – that enjoyment that angers us if it is our neighbours who enjoy things alien to us; enjoyment that keeps bringing us back to “guilty pleasures”, but also the jouissance that is the death drive and the jouissance that has a price that needs to be paid by the subject. Psychoanalysis is not a blueprint for revolution but it helps with revelations about power dynamics which then may help to deal with our contradictions instead of creating more splits and destruction. We definitely need to learn to move in different discourses and I am concerned with the old question of ’68: how to emerge from a hysterical discourse that needs a master without becoming the master discourse again? Or, as Žižek puts it: what happens the day after the revolution?
Sources
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Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21. London: Hogarth Press online edition: https://www.valas.fr/IMG/pdf/Freud_Complete_Works.pdf (02.08.2024)
Freud, S. (1950). Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition, 1. London: Hogarth Press
Lacan J. (1958-1957). The Seminar Book VI: Desire and its Interpretation. Translated by Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts. open internet source: https://archive.org/details/book-06-desire-and-its-interpretation (02.08.2024)
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Zupančič*, A. (2024). Disavowal. Polity; 1. Edition