The Aesthetics of Anxiety

The Berkeley Conference on Precarious Aesthetics, UC Berkeley, October 15-17, 2015

Dylan Trigg

Introduction

Wittgenstein poses a question: “Is it always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a

sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” Philosophy’s ocularcentric
leanings have tended to contradict Wittgenstein. From the shadows, clear thinking emerges as an
expression of light piercing through a veil of obscurity. As an affront to philosophy, indistinction
bears the mark of cloudy thinking, a thinking that either refuses to leave the cave or is otherwise
unable to find the exit. I would like to dwell on Wittgenstein’s question. I would like to find in
his question a place for anxiety. What is it in anxiety that forces us to turn away so violently, to
flee the scene lest we become paralyzed? Is there not, so I would suggest, a sense in which
anxiety reveals something to us that is too clear, too distinct, too visible? Our flight in the face of
anxiety is instructive. To take flight means here to return to the indistinct picture that forms a
veneer in our waking lives, to reintegrate an element of fuzziness within our perception. In
taking flight, we would like, in other words, to find an image for anxiety. Philosophy and literature
affords us an inroad to these thoughts. Indeed, it is in and through the literary word that a
distance is forged, which far from severing us from the phenomena of anxiety, instead draws us
closer to it.

***

How does anxiety appear? How does it make itself known as a phenomenon? A human being is
seized by anxiety, and this seizure is thematized through the body. The mouth is no longer
marked by the power to speak, but instead becomes voiceless, an abyss in the midst of the face.
The remainder of the body, from the stomach to the hands, from the temple of the forehead to
the legs that support the body, contort themselves. It is a body that expresses something, which
the subject him or herself is unable to comprehend. The body takes leave of the senses, directing
itself toward a danger that is invisible to the subject but visible on some other level. Conflict
ensues. Your body gains the quality of being distinct from your sense of self. The perception of a
Cartesian dualism intervenes, even though in ontological terms, you remain one and the same
thing with your body. From an experiential angle, however, your body becomes an “it,” and
anonymous zone of matter occupying a world divergent from your own. It perceives, it thinks, it
feels—and it does so irrespective of your own standing in the world. If we are concerned here
with a very specific type of anxiety—bodily in form and content—then it is an anxiety that lies at
the heart of every subdivision of the mood, be it social anxiety, phobic anxiety, or generalized
anxiety. At stake in this anxiety of anxieties is not a concern tied up with particular things, as
such. Rather, the anxiety concerns the very fabric of what it means to be a human subject with a
discernible sense of self.

***

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Clarice Lispector describes the anxiety that emits from this collapse of human identity:

I got so scared when I realize I lost my human form for several hours. I don’t
know if I’ll have another form to replace the one I lost… But I also don’t know
what form to give what happened to me. And without giving it a form, nothing
can exist for me… And that this is my struggle against disintegration: trying now
to give it a form. A form shapes chaos, a form gives constitution to the
amorphous substance—the vision of an infinite piece of meat is the vision of
the mad, but if I cut that meat into pieces and parcel them out over days and
over hungers—then it would no longer be perdition and madness: it would once
again be humanized life (6).

Born into chaos, it will become necessary for the human to construct an image, fashioned from
the mélange of flesh he or she is initially confronted with. With clinical precision, Lispector
reveals the edges of this work, the point at which the body ceases to be identifiable with the self.
A series of revelations unfolds; the form clothing our image is proven to be disposable.
Moreover, through this contingency, we are made aware that the inhuman materiality lurking
behind the image is never dissolved nor sublimated into identity. Rather, it remains as residual
matter, latent and there all along. In the facelessness of matter, Lispector undergoes a crisis of
faith. Her belief in the corporeality of identity as having a gracefully composed basis is destroyed.
To survive, she will return to the beginning; to the point at which identity chrysalises from an
otherwise amorphous mass.

A form shapes chaos, she tells us, a form gives constitution. Without this veneer of protection, the
madness of the flesh ensues. What is it we witness in this statement of the dehumanization of
life? Do the confessions of Lispector bear witness to a failure in perception, to the hallucination
of a body that is otherwise human(e)? To phrase the statement in this way risks fabricating a
rigid sense of what ought to constitute a human body. Let us say, by way of contrast that what is
rendered visible in Lispector’s crisis is not an inability to see distinctly, but an excessive ability to
see too clearly. There is too much flesh, too much clarity, and not enough indistinctness to
preserve the identity. What is needed, in short, in order “to replace an indistinct picture by a
sharp one” is the function of an object.

***

Anxious subjects unable to confront (or otherwise traumatised by) the vision described by
Lispector tend to become agoraphobic. There, they construct walls, both imaginary and real, to
contain and house their anxiety. Bridges will become elevated to sites of avoidance; banal locales
imbued with a terrifying aura; and entire neighborhoods colonized by a nameless and ominous
atmosphere. Only in the home, in the space of repose, does anxiety gain the image of being
domesticated. From the home, a window looks out onto a world. Through this vantage point,
the world appears unfamiliar and uncertain. It is a place where, to paraphrase Sartre, anything can
happen. Your anxiety is managed and manageable. The window serves to frame your anxiety just
as the work of literature provides the necessary distance for the reader to glance directly at his or

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her own truth. For the agoraphobe, Wittgenstein is correct: it is the indistinct image, blurred at
the edges and softened at its core, which is the object of desire. Thanks to the window, the
world is screened—perhaps we might even say pre-viewed—before it arrives within the home.

But in the home, there is anxiety alongside sanctuary. Night draws its own set of unnerving
conclusions, which, far from bringing about a lack of clarity, instead accent the vision of
madness captured in Lispector. As the day withdraws its cloak of familiarity, so the home
assumes a different presence. At night, your ears adopt a different relation to the world. The
sounds submerged by daylight—creaking and cracking of the walls and floors—invade the night
with a renewed sense of disquiet. Shadows that are otherwise buried in the life of habitual
existence emerge for the troubled sleeper as phantoms belonging to a nightmare. The home
becomes polarized as an object of both anxiety and repose at once, a joint space of agoraphobia
and claustrophobia, both freeing you of anxiety while also burying you within its depth.

Against Heidegger, anxiety has an object. Indeed, anxiety must have an object. A bridge appears
for the agoraphobe less as the means to destroy his world and more as a way of preserving that
world. The agoraphobe comes close to crossing the bridge without ever seeing it through, and an
invisible presence prevents him from dispelling the myth surrounding the object. Outside of the
home, a series of objects fashion his anxiety into a navigable landscape. Beyond the bridge,
plazas, canals, and monuments each signify the intersection where the indistinct picture risks
becoming too clear, too real, too formless. Sealed off, the bridge encloses him within a world, the
edge of which marks a realm lost to its own haziness, as though it occupied a dreamscape
removed from the existence of the waking subject.

***

This anxiety of anxieties, an anxiety greater than the manageable anxiety faced before the bridge,
is prefigured in Lispector’s “vision of an infinite piece of meat [as] the vision of the mad.” What
lies beyond the bridge is not the continuation of a world constant with your own. Rather, the
beyond is the world stripped of its image, revealed in its nakedness and exposed to an
anonymity, which is concealed by dint of trepidation alone. Objects such as bridges, telephone
masts, colossal libraries, and above all, doors to unfamiliar buildings, serve to divide the world
into sectors, just as the naming of the body operates with a view of giving form to what is
otherwise anonymous. The intersection between the shoulder and the arm, the fissure where
your neck suddenly becomes your head, or the indistinct zone where your pelvis ceases to be
your pelvis and suddenly begins its journey into your naval—with each of these cuts into the
flesh, a landscape is wrought from the work of chaos, allowing you to delineate the specifically
human construction of the organism.

The situation is no less pressing in the opacity of the city. It is Inhuman. Savage. Brute. It
conceals itself in a vision of domestication but its image is thin, and throughout, there appear a
series of gaps, inside of which dwells the “vision of an infinite piece of meat.” Agoraphobic
subjects ill-at-ease in the world, damaged by their naïve trust in the home, are all too aware of
these gaps punctuating the urban landscape. They know that if they trespass outside of their

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homeworld, then there is no small risk of never returning to that home. They know that the
formation of home as a human place requires a precarious balance between illusion and
indistinction. Images must merge from one corner of the home to another, from day to night,
from one second to another. They know that the work of “place-making” is constantly
unfinished, and requires relentless vigilance, lest the home fall prey to the madness of the
“infinite piece of meat” that constitutes both corporeality and spatiality.

***

“Is it,” to return to Wittgenstein, “always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp
one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” There is an image that haunts us
whether we suffer from agoraphobia, claustrophobia, or any other “deviation” from life. The
sharpness of the image runs too close, reveals not simply too much, but something that is
repellent. The repulsion is there in each of us in our encounter with the mirror and what lies
beyond the mirror image. In a scene from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Catherine Deneuve’s
character looks at her reflection in the mirror only to find, for a brief glance, the reflection is that
of a strange man.

You will have encountered the same scene countless times in your own rapport with the mirror
image. You will have noticed from time to time, and especially in the morning before your
identity has been reformed, that the ostensibly familiar image of yourself as yourself suddenly
undergoes a loss of form. A gap forms, equivalent to that separating your pelvis from your torso,
or dividing the wall of your apartment from the neighbor’s apartment next door. Spaces form in
the darkness. Gaps emerge, as if from nowhere. But those same gaps do not belong to an
accident in perception, but instead take root in the fabric of identity itself.

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For a moment, let us thinking alongside Lacan:

Even in the experience of the mirror, a moment can come about when the
image we believe we abide by undergoes modification. If this specular image we
have facing us, which is our stature, our face, our two eyes, allows the dimension
of our gaze to emerge, the value of the image starts to change—above all if
there’s a moment when this gaze that appears in the mirror starts not to look at
us any more. There’s an initium, an aura, a dawning sense of uncanniness which
leaves the door open to anxiety (88).

Within the frame of the mirror, there is a sense of something other. It is the clear and distinct
image of the face in its lucidity. As the door is left open to anxiety, so an occult presence joins
these parts—the eyes, the mouth, the ears. That presence is you. Through working behind the
scenes of the mirror, you congeal these parts into a whole, conferring over them a haziness,
which forces the eyes to reform into the forehead, the mouth to fuse with the chin, until
suddenly the parts resemble the whole. But even in the mirror—especially in the mirror when
performing the daily duty of preparing our face for the outside—Lacan reminds us of those
moments in which we lose sight of the work of reformation, allowing the specular image to
become a spectral image. The image is too close, the face too naked. “A living body,” so
Merleau-Ponty writes,

Seen at too close quarters, and divorced from any background against which it
can stand out, is no longer a living body, but a mass of matter as outlandish as a
lunar landscape, as can be appreciated by inspecting a segment of skin through a
magnifying glass. Again, seen from too great a distance, the body loses its living
value, and is seen simply as a puppet or automation (314).

To see “clearly” means neither being too close nor too distant. To see clearly means being
situated in the in-between, at the point where a thing—a body, a home—is embedded in its
greatest ambiguity. Stripped of its context, the body becomes alien; the home becomes geometry.
Therein, we see too much of that infinite matter underlining our sense of self.

Finally, an aesthetics of anxiety assumes the role the window does for the agoraphobe. The
adjoining affect to anxiety is not, as is often thought anger, but instead nostalgia. As with the
window frame, nostalgia holds things in place, allows us to pre-view the scene before returning
to it time and again. The movement of returning is telling. When we turn away from the object
of anxiety in repulsion, then we do so with a curious desire to turn back to the scene. There
exists in those brief seconds an epiphany, an imageless realm that spellbinds us. Of course, by
the time we have in fact returned, our anxiety has disappeared, now mastered by the act of
possession. What remains is a nostalgia for the deserted space. The aesthetic image holds an
advantage over our perceptual experience: it has the capacity to cast a spell over our affects, to
captivate and fixate them. In returning to the written page, to the cinematic still, to the canvas,
we catch sight of the very thing that would otherwise repel us. If it remains frozen, monstrous,
inhuman, then it does so through being preserved in its indistinction.