A response to Dr Julie Wilson
In her
paper, A Speculative Exploration of Childhood
Remembrance in the Works of Genesis P-Orridge,
Dr Julie Wilson explores aspects of the art and performance of
Genesis P-Orridge through the lens of C G Jung’s Child archetype.
The paper focuses in particular on the role of the child in
P-Orridge’s work, and suggests that it is through this personal
exploratory work that the artist’s creativity is generated and
developed.
Although
much of what Wilson has to say about P-Orridge demonstrates a clear
and well-informed reading of his work, there are certain elements in
her analysis which seem strongly Freudian in conception, and which
seem to me to mis-state the artist’s intentions. I will begin by
focusing on some of the primary strengths of Wilson’s arguments,
and will highlight those areas where an overly Freudian perspective
seems to have distorted the presentation of the artist’s art.
Wilson
begins by setting out the basic premise that the Jungian archetype is
‘indigenous to each individual’ and uses this to defend (in this
context, rightly) the position that not only are the archetypes in
some way universal (i.e. applicable to all), but that they are also
individually treated within each of us. Thus commonality and
distinctiveness are brought within her paradigm, which makes the
point that her analysis of P-Orridge is significant beyond the
individual artist and may be available for appropriation by us all.
She
continues by drawing attention to ‘the artist’s frequent
visitations to the memories of his own childhood, his use of
childlike states’, and takes this to suggest ‘that there is
something fundamental which is buried within the philosophical and
psychological dynamics of the child which P-Orridge is drawing upon.’
It is not appropriate to engage here in a public analysis of
P-Orridge’s inner life, but I think it needs to be said that
Wilson’s use of the term ‘buried’ reveals her approach to be
significantly influenced by Freudian thinking, and this in a way
which does some damage to the altogether more productive and creative
Jungian treatment of the archetype. Although she touches on the ‘raw
energy associated with the first time engagement with ideas, images
and the environment as a whole, which is sought by the artist’ (a
view with which Martin Buber would agree1,
and which also supports the notion of our self-creativity within the
experimental moment of self-becoming), she measures this against both
Jung and Freud’s (especially Freud’s) rather negative
characterization of the child as a latent force able to serve in a
compensatory or corrective way.
In taking
this line, Wilson undercuts her own support of Jung’s broader
position that the archetype ‘anticipates a nascent, or original
state of consciousness’ by relating it necessarily to the
individual’s own original state of historical personhood (pure
Freud). The problem here is one of mis-reading what is meant by Jung
in the term ‘nascent, or original state of consciousness’. We
are, with Jung, in the realm of archetypes, and the assumption is
that these are perennially present (that is, they exist in a state of
presentness). The nascent or original state, must therefore refer to
a mode of perceptual grasp (represented and effected through the
medium of the Child archetype), rather than the very Freudian concept
of a regression to a previous point in time. Thus, when P-Orridge
accesses the ‘Child’ it must be taken not as a retreat to a
former (or ‘original’ self), but as an emergence into a state of
present originality. It is this that prioritizes the creativity
Wilson is seeking through the use of the archetype, and it is
excellently expressed by Buber, when he writes of the child:
He has stepped out of the glowing darkness of chaos into
the cool light of creation. But he does not possess it yet; he must
first draw it truly out, he must make it into a reality for himself,
he must find for himself his own world by seeing and hearing and
touching and shaping it. Creation reveals, in meeting, its essential
nature as form. It does not spill itself into expectant senses, but
rises up to meet the grasping senses. (I and
Thou pp25-26)
Wilson
emphasizes the notion of the child as a corrective to the adult
state, and adds that ‘the child therefore exists at both ends of
the psychological spectrum’. However, this formulation runs counter
to the sense of emergent presentness which is implicit not only in
the notion of a living archetype, but also in the specifics of the
performance work of P-Orridge. Instead of taking the archetype as (at
least partially) a representation of the historical child (as the
Freudian approach tends to do), we might do better to treat the
nature of the archetype as a mode of perceptual realization which is
available for immediate constructive inclusion in the self-determined
act of (creative) being. This overcomes the problematic requirement
of saying that we need to have been a specific child in order to
enjoy the Child archetype, or that until we are old we cannot engage
with the Wise Old man archetype. Freud, however, was thoroughly
focused on the concept of a buried, personal history. His
characterization of the psyche in The
Interpretation of Dreams (which itself draws
on his earlier Project for a Scientific
Psychology) is of a closed system, controlled
by a censor, in which past events remain latent forces seeking
discharge. The image is of a mechanistic, sealed system in which the
aim is to maintain a constancy of pressure. It is precisely such a
world that P-Orridge consistently drives against in the formulation
of his art and life.
For all
that, Wilson’s application of the Child archetype to P-Orridge
represents an interesting, and a previously much under-regarded
understanding of his artistic drive. It is also the case that Wilson
has shown enough in her paper to suggest that it is an area which
deserves further exploration. The explicit strength of her argument
becomes clear when she draws on Baudrillard to suggest that ‘the
nature of the child’s Being is immediate, instinctive and primary’.
This strongly existential bias is central to P-Orridge’s attempts
to engage utterly with his environment, and to explore and create
something new out of the experience. One can witness this in his
insistent use of such simple terms as ‘NOW!’, ‘PRESENT TIME’,
and ‘Even Further’. However, Baudrillard himself overstates the
point when he adds (and Wilson quotes) ‘Childhood haunts the adult
universe as a subtle and deadly presence’. It is ingenuous to add
that ‘this is not only true of real children
but also of the archetype’ (emphasis
added). The confusion between the archetype and the historical is
explicit here, and the point is presumably to do with the tension
existing between child and adult modes of experience; the considered,
rationalist structures of the latter finding little or no purchase on
the imaginative, creative and free-flowing world of the former. The
psychological axe is sharpened by the (adult) knowledge that the
child will come to rule the future. The ontological axe should,
however, be blunted by the equal adult knowledge that in ruling the
future the child will be not: it is in an adult mode that the former
child will rule.
The question
resolves to one of the authenticity of experience, as Wilson makes
clear. As adults we are frequently inauthentic in our self-dealings;
and we adopt masks and modes of convenience which we erroneously call
identity. It is the role of the Child to remind us of the need to
‘be’ authentically, and it is in drawing our attention to this in
the context of P-Orridge’s work that Wilson makes a significant
contribution. She writes:
for
him the notion of identity is linked to a sensation of the authentic
which the Child represents and facilitates. In other words, for
P-Orridge, authenticity can be said to be, firstly, immediacy,
availability, vulnerability to the sensual experience of the moment.
Secondly, an openness to the possibility of any physical or
psychological gesture which emanates from the moment. And Third a
willingness to participate in ‘Other’ seductive narratives or
what we might call organic forms which lie outside the notion of
binary logic.
Developing
her position, Wilson goes on to explore some of the specifics of
P-Orridge’s work, focusing on selected references to childhood in
his work and correspondence, and in particular on the need he has to
take daily doses of adrenaline to compensate for physiological damage
caused by the treatment of a childhood illness. Commenting on the
positive spin that P-Orridge places on the need for daily medication
(‘I choose each day to be alive for the next day, which is a good
position to be in, to be really clear about…’), Wilson treats
P-Orridge’s response in strictly psychological terms:
Statements such as this speak of the adult’s attempts
to come to terms with the irrational and disorientating elements left
over from childhood… This statement implies that the adult
mentality is capable of intellectual infanticide on the child.
The argument
is that a rationalization of a bad experience is needed to prevent an
‘”uncontrolled” descent into distress and forced dependency.’
Its prominence in P-Orridge is related to the daily reminder of a
childhood loss of control.
I don’t
think we can necessarily dismiss the influence
of this aspect of P-Orridge’s life too quickly, but if we are
dealing with archetypes (as opposed to Freudian complexes) we need to
allow somewhat greater fluidity in our interpretation of the event
and its implications. We can take it that it is correct to suggest
that P-Orridge has an unusual physical link with childhood, but I
don’t accept that we need treat this present emergence of the child
as a ‘haunting’. Rather, the proximity of the child requires its
acknowledgement by the adult in the present state of immediacy.
Moreover, the need for a physical and conscious engagement with the
future (taking a drug to ensure that there will be
a future) leads to a recognition that we are self-creative beings.
Our future is thus treated as our own construction and is drawn out
of our own present. This is ontology, not psychology. Thus P-Orridge
is far from attempting infanticide on his child/Child, but is instead
attempting to re-inforce and re-engage it in the present. If it is
anything, the preoccupation P-Orridge has with uncertainty,
engagement, presentness and all the other characteristics of the
child-state is a reflection of his honouring
of the Child. P-Orridge is attempting both in
the form and in the content of his work to ensure the continued
survival of the Child (as symbolic of a New Aeon) alongside the
survival of the adult. It is ultimately an act of mutuality in which
the adult invites the Child to share.
It is
natural that Wilson should explore the context of P-Orridge’s
public work, and the close relationship he has with the ‘cultural
underground’ and marginality. Explorations of identity (such as
P-Orridge’s) will necessarily push against such margins, not least
because of the need to express the notion of will through the
transcendence of its current position. In a Nietzschean sense, the
will must press beyond its own boundary in order to properly express
its condition. It is here that the relevance of the ‘Even Further’
becomes clear and links with the practice of magick for which
P-Orridge is well known.
Wilson makes
a welcome observation, in the context of initiatory ritual and its
marginalization, when she notes the distinction between the socially
coherent rituals of tribal societies and the altogether more
disjunctive forms practised in the West. In his public work it is
very much this formal contextualization which P-Orridge seems to be
hinting at, both in the early street performances (where the context
is that of the viewer confronted on ‘home territory’ by the
unusual), and, for example, in the networking of T.O.P.Y. through
which P-Orridge constructed a context in which exploration and
disorientation could be regarded as socially
as well as personally significant. In
referring, however, to the possibility that in such rituals the
‘concept of death is ever present’ Wilson offers a reading which
is overly substance-oriented in its thinking. It might be better to
regard such initiations as a structured means of confronting risk
(the risk is to the ontology of self and identity, not the physical),
the aim of which is that of engagement with Life. It is the risk of
becoming open to a totality of presentness which brings with it a
counterpoint of ‘death’, but by ‘death’ I mean here the
failure to extend the boundary of possibility, the failure to enter
into a true existential immediacy of self-creative expression. In
P-Orridge’s terms, ‘Our aim is wakefulness. Our enemy is
dreamless sleep.’
The
influence of a Freudian view is again explicit when Wilson suggests
that:
the re-establishment of a state of childlikeness goes
much deeper than simply re-establishing a holistic sensual experience
of the world. It requires the sedation of what Freud calls the basic
mental mechanism of the adult psyche which attempts to ‘relieve the
individual from the tension created in him by his needs’. Driving
this mechanism is the ‘Pleasure principle’ and behind that the
adult ego.
If we accept Wilson’s
argument we are obliged also to accept the implication that we are
driven by an imperative to return to an inorganic state. This is
central to the mechanistic formulation of the Pleasure Principle, and
it is likely that it is this which has led Wilson to derive her
historicized view of an ‘original state’ to which I referred
earlier. In adopting this line, Wilson endorses Freud’s negative
teleology and extreme determinism. By this I mean Freud’s
suggestion that not only is the aim of life to return to a state of
total passivity (i.e. death), but that we can never escape our
biological and historical heritage. In effect we are wedded to a form
of understanding in which the present is made up entirely of that
which has gone before. Agency is granted (erroneously) to the past2,
and the present has no meaning except that which is pressed upon it.
Thus, in the case of the artist, the present creative act is
characterized by an overwhelming passivity, whereas experientially
and empirically the act of the present should be one of extreme
creativity.
There is an interesting
extract of a letter which Wilson cites in which P-Orridge moves from
a childhood description to an altogether more intense expression of
his adult consciousness. Wilson correctly identifies this as an
example of the co-existence of discrete streams of thought in
P-Orridge’s work, and it is through this that she attempts to
derive an integrative Jungian model from her material. What is
equally interesting though is the unstated possibility that this form
of integration (which is characterized by the notion of splintering
and fragmentation by Wilson) may be expressing a quite different
notion of process and creative advancement.
We can take it that
Genesis chose his name carefully, and if we look to that initiatory
book of the Bible we find in the first descriptions of creation a
carefully laid out paradigm whereby creation is
‘creation-by-addition’3.
Each day adds to the previous, but retains the previous content in
equal status. It is rather more than a simple overlaying of the
former with the latter. Moreover, at the end of each day there is a
moment of reflection (integration) in which the distinctiveness of
the new construct is primary. In drawing the Child into his work,
P-Orridge is echoing this model of creative advance from an
experienced present into an undetermined future. Nothing is lost in
the process, but rather each moment brings with it a fresh
unification of all the contributory elements. That is, each moment is
new, but each moment is also fully inclusive. This is in direct
contradiction of the more normative teleology we apply to the Bible
and which permeates the thought of both Freud and Jung. If we revise
our concept of psychical integration in this light, it becomes no
longer a search for some pre-determined goal (as Freud might have
it), or a drive towards some future state of passive union and
fulfilment (as is implicit in Jung’s religiosity). Instead we have
a vision in which integration becomes the self-creation of the future
itself, and in which the seemingly disjunctive elements of the
present are drawn into a true unity of the experienced event.
Because of this need to
prioritize the ‘experienced event’ we cannot therefore rely on
Freud’s Pleasure Principle, or simply accept the ‘”sedation”
of that part of the adult psyche which seeks to relieve the
individual of the tension of his needs, [and which] means the
sedation or loss of the Ego.’ That the ‘ego’ is sedated (or
perhaps better, annihilated) in P-Orridge’s work is not in
question. It is also clear that P-Orridge works towards
‘de-programming’ as Wilson points out. However, this loss of
(adult) ego and deliberate de-programming is not characterized by the
replacement of the ego/programme by an earlier model (i.e., the
child’s ego/lack of programmed or constructed behaviour). The
apparent sedation of the ego (and I tend to believe that it is only
apparent) is the result of our own misplaced assumption that a person
is fully identified with their adult face. Beyond this, we also tend
to see in our notion of identity a parallel concept of ‘consistency’.
Thus we expect a person to be, and to behave as, the imago we project
upon them. In many cases we are broadly right. Socially constructed
convention dictates how people behave. Our project finds its hook;
and both parties in the relationship are rewarded. In the case of
P-Orridge, however, (and I take this as at the core of his
philosophical direction), we are not at any essential level
identified with our ego or persona. Rather, the aim of his work seems
to be consistent with a model in which the ‘self’ is a construct
of a particular moment of existential realization. That is, we exist
as self-creating events, and life is enjoyed through the unique
creativity of the present.
I would argue that it is
for this reason that P-Orridge’s work has sought to attack the ego,
sought to make us question the ontological basis of who and what we
are. He is attempting to draw out the multiple realities of a
full-blooded event-based ontology. Hence his designation of those
best able to demonstrate this as ‘hyper-quaquaversal’ (his term
for an extreme and simultaneous reaching out from the centre to all
possible directions). To achieve this end we cannot prioritize one
element over another, but rather must allow the mutual co-existence
and exchange of all the archetypes together, at the same time, in the
one person4. Thus
all experience adds to all previous experience in a way that is
progressive, forever in the process of advancement into the new. It
is an ontology reflected in our conception of the infinitely
expanding universe (in contrast, Freud’s universe was
developmentally static). In short, the abandonment of the primacy of
the ego is not simply a means of evocation, but rather it represents
a structural model of future existence. The ego is indicative of
constraint by the past, and it is because of this that in P-Orridge’s
work it is not ‘sedated’, but thrown to the wolves.
Wilson later cites
P-Orridge:
The basic premise in all my work has always been, if I
think about something and it seems to make sense, to project it into
the public arena of popular culture. To see whether it survives or
not in its own right, to see what happens and what is confirmed and
denied and what creates interesting interactions and confrontations.
This notion of projection
carries with it rather more than the psychological aspects cited by
Wilson who treats the term as ‘usually associated with the manner
in which people attach their fears, or dreams and aspirations to
another individual.’ She continues by saying:
It is clear that he [P-Orridge] believes that by
amplifying the dynamic character of a freed psyche into the public
arena, in other words by projecting an idea into public space, it
might metaphorically detach itself from its biological origins,
expand and gather weight as other individuals attach significance to
it.
There are a number of
problems with this analysis, not least that it reveals Wilson to be
wedded to an overly materialistic ontology in which the mind and body
are treated as competing substances. Hence the psyche is described as
being ‘freed into the public arena’, and an idea is only
‘metaphorically’ able to detach itself from its biological
origins. Part of the problem is her reading of ‘projection’ in
psychological terms, after Freud et al. A better reading would treat
the ‘project’ as a constructed reality in its own right. In this
way the project serves as a mediating element in the broader
construction of new realities. This more radical concept requires
that the project properly exists, and is as functionally effective as
any more physically rendered being. If we treat projects in this way,
we render the substance theories of mind and body redundant and can
instead treat both conceptual and material ‘beings’ as
essentially similar in type. The classic example of this was given by
Ludwig Feuerbach in his attempts to treat God as the mis-appropriated
manifestation of essentially human attributes. Famously, he was able
to describe God as an atheist through this route5.
In effect, the unassimilated essence is projected out as ‘other’,
and then treated as a beacon towards which we must move. In the
regaining of the project, we shift the paradigmatic nature of
reality. Thus truth is movable, and relative. This process finds
resonance with P-Orridge’s performance work:
Very slowly he moved about; at a barely perceptible
speed, giving a sensation ov nothing changing yet investing thee
tiniest change with potent resonance. He would raise thee stick with
one hand until it touched a specific point, like the top of a tripod.
He would lean in one position towards that spot, balance, then move
one foot forward imperceptibly, freeze like a statue, move thee free
arm to the knee, freeze, reach out with the stick for another point…
(From Ratio:3 Transmediators)
We can see in this
description of ‘reaching out’ how the frozen moments reflect the
point of integration as each subtle change takes place. In reaching
out to our project, we transform the space in which we act. More
significant though is that if we abandon the substance-oriented model
(which erects a boundary between the mental and physical components
of reality) we can grant full autonomy to the project. In projecting
an idea into space, the ‘idea’ becomes an agentive reality for
those who perceive it. Thus it becomes constitutive of the
percipient’s existential moment of self-realization and actuality.
Thus we create our own gods. And thus we can regard P-Orridge’s
public work as a considered attempt to change the matrix of
existence. He is literally engaged in creating new universes.
The psychological focus
offered by Wilson undermines the creative reaching out implied and
evidenced by the artist’s work, which is consciously ontological in
its form and purpose. As a result, Wilson mis-states the case when
she characterizes P-Orridge as ‘defining personal realities’.
What he is in fact doing is constructing
them. Moreover, by relying on a personal historical perspective
(after Freud), she mistakenly treats the notion of ‘original self’
as identical with that of a ‘creative self’. In an event-based
ontology, in which each moment is one of creative self-determination,
the ‘self’ is newly formed in the present. Thus it is by
definition ‘original’ at the moment we engage with it. The
artist’s quest is therefore one of simultaneous self-realization
and reflection. To
equate this with a regressive journey to an historical moment (as
though we can only create at the beginning and lose all power to do
so subsequently) is to fundamentally undermine the raw creative
instinct that drives the artist. We might wish then to consider that,
like the Shaman, P-Orridge’s quest for originality is only
metaphorically (to recur to Wilson’s term) a journey to a previous
point in time. The image of a beginning is used simply as a lure to
somewhere else, somewhere undetermined and Now! The psychological
determinism of the Freudian model mistakes the method for the result,
with the all too constraining implications of identifying the ‘self’
with a personal past.
Although I have focused on
what I see as some of the interpretative problems in Wilson’s
piece, it is nonetheless the case that in addressing the psychology
of the artist she has paved the way for a long overdue critical
reappraisal of P-Orridge’s work. In particular she has successfully
moved the focus away from the documentation of the art and brought it
to bear on the process of artistic action. In the case of an artist
such as P-Orridge this shift in focus is essential to an assessment
of the significance of his impact; an impact which spreads much wider
than the simple appreciation of produced ‘works’.
Paul Cecil
University of Sussex
September 1999
Notes:
1 See Martin Buber, I
and Thou, T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1959
(2nd Edition)
2 Attributing agency to
the past (i.e. that event A precedes event B, and that B is caused
by A) is a common error of theories of causality, and relates to
misplaced notions of being-as-substance. The kind of processive
thinking exemplified in P- Orridge’s work is much closer to the
process philosophy of A N Whitehead (Process
and Reality, 1929), or the existentialist
thinking of Sartre. These two 20th century philosophers emphasized
the creativity of the present moment in an attempt to escape the
strict determinism of earlier modes of thought.
3 See Gabriel Josipovici,
The Book of God, Yale
University Press, New Haven, 1988.
4 There are of course
implications for the very notion of person in this.
5 See Ludwig Feuerbach,
The Essence of Christianity,
Prometheus Books, NY, 1989 (originally published 1841).
