Mourning undead: the melancholy zombie.

Willems, Brian

How can the critical lack at the base of modern subjectivity be crossed out or taken beyond a mere nostalgic U-turn? This is the question immediately posed by "Zwischen Zwei Toden/ Between Two Deaths" at Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe in Germany (May 12-August 19, 2007), a group show on "the current 'melancholic' state of subjectivity" that includes Nan Goldin, Charlie White, Sue de Beer, and Martin Dammann, with an accompanying catalogue (published by Hatje Cantz Verlag) featuring essays by Laurence A. Rickels, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Ehrenberg. According to curators Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin, a recent spate of German exhibitions have focused on the gothic, neo-romantic melancholy characterizing today's decentered subject (e.g., Deutsche Bank Salzburg's 2004 "Heavenly Creatures" and "Wunschwelten: Neue Romantik in der Kunst der Gegenwart" at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle in 2005), but few have yet asked what it takes to go beyond this much-maligned crisis of "boundless pessimism on the one side, state-ordered or self-help optimism on the other."

The title "Between Two Deaths" is taken from Jacques Lacan's discussion of Antigone in the 1959-60 seminar translated as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992). Briefly, the first death refers to the child being removed from its mother's breast, thereby experiencing cosmic separation for the first time. This feeling is "overcome" by its entering the symbolic order of language, with the result that "the child feels the pain of loss that prefigures real death for the first time" (Peter Weibel, "Forward," 9). The second death is therefore the biological death that awaits us all. An awareness of this first symbolic death can be linked to the fragmented self of modernity where "death orders life to 'Enjoy!'" (Weibel, 11), from which arises the ability to "know one's own death" (Martin Heidegger), to anticipate the possibility of nonexistence, as well as the command to enjoy the time left to us, what remains between these two deaths. The aim of this show is to "sail around this commandment to enjoy" (11) by immersing oneself in what Zizek calls mourning's "emancipatory potential."

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Although it could be said that ideology is most firmly in place once it is no longer thought to exist, art that reflects modernity's decentered subject nonetheless represents a certain devaluation of the grand narratives of ideology and industriousness. Instead of having a trickle-down command system where orders are arbitrarily handed down by "big systems" to the lowly "masses," the contemporary subject "is imprisoned between responsibility for itself and the simultaneous lack of self-determining capacity for action" (Ellen Blumenstein, "Name Your Desire," 19). Instead of overthrowing Big Brother, one now need only overthrow one's Self. The first recommendation for achieving such rebellious reflexivity involves accepting the lack of self at the base of life (because of its removal from the order of the Real), namely the "undead" nature of being caught between two deaths, where life--again, in a very Heideggerian manner--amounts to a kind of dying.

This melancholy zombie that is our collective self, this immortal shuffling between two deaths can be seen in Sue de Beer's Black Sun (2005), whose title is taken from Julia Kristeva's 1987 book on depression and melancholia. Kristeva's principal thesis is that depression is born of the inability to acknowledge the loss of oneness with the mother (launching or internalizing a never-ending sense of incompleteness), whose acceptance propels the subject into the symbolic world of language. De Beer's installation consists of multiple projections and C-print stills partially glimpsed through the glassless windows of a large white cutout house, though the entire film is also screened in another area. Some of the scenes take place inside a bedroom that can be seen to hold the mother's missing place, where a young girl tries on the absent parent's negligee and wig. This is intercut with footage of two older figures, both somehow related to the young girl, as if reflecting in out-of-sync fashion what she's currently doing. All the action is romantically lit in childlike theatrical settings, replete with bed sheet ghosts in tennis shoes ready for trick-or-treating. De Beer says that her work often deals with teenagers because that is the time when selfhood is largely formed (or is at least set in concrete), when you begin to realize that everyone around you lacks absolute perfection, including yourself, and hence that everything you do is somehow imperfect, but that even knowing this you do it just the same. This is one possible avenue out of modernity's crisis--not so much to "fail better," but to fail more often.

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In a nutshell, these are the kinds of scenarios that foment depression. Alain Ehrenberg, who teaches at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, argues that during the nineteenth century depression was seen as the sign of a creative genius bordering on unreason. Only the select few could possess such depressive "depths." But today the situation has changed. Everyone can be a star now, and therefore everyone is depressed, namely, caught in the midst of a changeover from "the progressive subordination of a society based on discipline, mechanical obedience, conformity and the forbidden, to a society based on autonomy, that is, personal accomplishment, choice, self-ownership and individual initiative" (Ehrenberg, "Depression," 61). We bear or endure this bottom-up subordination, inflicting it upon ourselves, fulfilling Foucault's description of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975), whose ideal was that "the inmates should be caught up in a power structure of which they themselves are the bearers."

This individualist turn of the screw in mass idolatry can be found in Marlene McCarty's ballpoint pen images, culled from newspapers and other sources, of teenage girls who killed a parent or an entire family. In these images the faces are drawn in a realistic manner, but all the breasts, penises, and vaginas are rendered--as if by X-ray vision--in all their see-through glory, shining through the clothes and arms of the family members comforting each other in what seem tragic circumstances. In a 2005 interview in artUS, McCarty says that she expressly aims at exposing these power structures we all seem to bear. The real-life murders that inspired her were caused by, "Especially claustrophobic domestic pressures, as opposed to events that were purely the outcome of mental illness, or sociopathology, or drugs.... The emotional disposition, and general condition of these girls is understandable and familiar. I think it's the hovering proximity of these horrific acts to situations we can all understand--and probably have experienced--that has really driven my interest in the project."

In "The Emancipatory Potential of the Living Dead," Zizek discusses "the monstrosity of the neighbor" as the object of a desire that can never be borne, since desire is mediated through language, and language is based on lack, on the inability to return (to) the desire of the Real. "One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (Evil) Thing that potentially lurks beneath every homely human face" (88). The lure, and horror, of McCarty's girls is likewise that of the neighbor, of the horrifically familiar, a theme again taken up in Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's videos Let the Good TimesRoll (2004) and Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit it Out (2006), where staged revelations of typical romantic encounters easily devolve into sexual and even threatening innuendo. "How, then, are we to counteract this fear, to break out of its vicious cycle? Not by way of a desperate search for safety, but, on the contrary, by going to the end, by accepting the nullity of that which we are afraid to lose: there is no Nature (as a stable, balanced life-cycle), there is no big Other" (88-9).

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This fear is further fleshed out in the art of Charlie White, who achieved renown through his photographic series Understanding Joshua (2000-01). Joshua, a life-sized alien puppet moping about in suburban setups, is the non-cohesive other made physically manifest, creating the anxiety of what can be called, in Heideggerian fashion, dying-in-life. In February 2002 on EGG, The Arts Show, White remarked that this series was inspired by psychological case studies where typically "you'll find a patient saying, 'I'm there but I don't actually feel that I'm there' or 'I'm in the room with people but I don't feel alive or I don't feel that they see me as alive.' That's really the starting point. Everything threatens Josh. Everything threatens him." But for the ZKM exhibition, a Joshua is no longer needed. Single, naked figures like the young woman in Granddaughter (2005), who stares out at the viewer like a contrapposto Venus, clinging to the rind of a newly eaten melon before an austere but barren fireplace, and Jody (2005), whose accusatory scowl, bloody facial nick, and brute vulnerability is reminiscent of Munch's Puberty (1895), betray the alien other that is simply already a part of the naked self. Bug-like beings are gone, and the body's underlying artificiality, showing (as Zizek says) that "there is no Nature," foregrounds all the horror that the alien in our midst previously conveyed. The complementary obverse of White's work is Walead Beshty's black-and-white Passages in Metropolis (2001-ongoing) photographic series, where abandoned and figureless shopping malls (except for store dummies and the odd homeless) prove just as revealing.

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But it's still not clear how much of a "way forward" is being offered here other than a simple awareness "that we are at the crime scene, but we are seemingly not doing anything" (Mika Hannula, "Show Me Love," 115). So far the description concerns a state of traditional melancholy, which arises when the subject is confronted with the non-cohesive other, and which instantly becomes a mere reflection of our own non-cohesive selves. But what is needed, as Alessia Ricciardi states in The Ends of Mourning (2003), is "a way to give voice to a mournful ethical and political imagination that transcends the aesthetics of nostalgia." Perhaps two elements for this "mournful" transcendence are at play in "Between Two Deaths": first, this horror-inspiring other is not given sufficient credit; and second, instead of using a Lacanian reading of lack, perhaps we would do better to take up Freud's concept of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which all life is subsumed under the return to a non-human state, where "the aim of all life is death [as] inanimate things existed before living ones." One artist here who actively embraces this non-human state is Jennifer West, whose Dirty Film and Double Last Luck Film (both 2006) deploy alcohol and other substances in her stead, achieved by coloring shards of film stock.

Rickels reschedules the Lacanian second death, according to which mourning is the repetition or rehearsal of a more fundamental initiatory relationship to loss, to accommodate the mourning undead. The second death is the death or murder we inflict on the dead through successful, substitutive work of mourning. The prospect of deferral of this outcome as unmourning introduces the other "as the figure of projection," who "will undertake the work of mourning the projector was unable to take up" ("Second Death," 96). This is a very different reading of the other, here ascribed as a plea to the other to undertake work that we ourselves are unable to perform or complete. In essence, it is only through the agency of the undead neighbor, of receiving a helping hand so to speak, that there can be any sort of "moving beyond." We all need help in a deep-structural sense, because the self inevitably collides with its finite nature and just how little we can physically accomplish in life: "the dead other has more life than the fiction of mourning dialogue permits. Along the ultimate projective frontier of loss preservation, it is the other who is in danger of losing him" (98). The other needs us as much as we need it, and the crux of this relationship is not necessarily one of horror (although Rickels's case studies are generally taken from that genre, if even via Hamlet), but of seduction, what Rickels calls "intrigue": "Where melancholic brooding lets loose, intrigue is required to lace up the mourning pageant in the absence of omniscience or surveillance" (103).

This "intriguing" help of the other can be seen in the work of Rita Ackermann, who first made her name with drawings of young girls in underwear sporting laptops and hypodermic needles, and with an underwear line for the Tokyo boutique Wet Melon. Her pencil and collage pieces at ZKM include The Shames of Loosing (2006) and Untitled (2006), which both feature what look like female versions of the gang members in Clockwork Orange, all wearing white, masculine briefs, thin, nipple-covering suspenders, bowler hats, high heels, and occasionally pearls, with most sporting Jimmy Connors-style tennis rackets instead of needles. While Shames offers multiple versions of the solo femme fatale in Untitled, the combined effect is one of clone-like perfection. These are the others that are like us and not like us, which is one of the main characteristics of clones, but moreover they only appear to us during or after the game is over, they are clearly not playing with themselves: most of the vamps are holding up their rackets as if ready to return our serve. They need us, in other words, to work, their direct gazes inviting us to play a game we are not sure we are playing, not at least until we come face-to-face with these images.

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The Shames of Loosing offers a graphic, if indeed serviceable, escape route from "mere" melancholy by demonstrating the inhuman(e) levels to which the elusive self is driven in the work of mourning. As beings so alike or close to ourselves as to invoke the clinamen (or microscopic swerve) that causes us to diverge from all others, and therefore from our very own selves, Ackermann's figures manage to do the work of our mourning only because we enter into a certain intrigue with them, affecting a relationship of open seduction rather than mortal anxiety. They likewise compel an "unnatural" liaison or association with the inhuman other that is already inside us, that inhuman existing between two deaths. To be sure, hooking up with such demanding, loose creatures is one way to cast off the shackles of mourning.

BRIAN WILLEMS is assistant professor of literature at the University of Split, Croatia. The catalogue discussed above is Zwischen Zwei Toden/Between Two Deaths, eds. Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe/Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007).