|
Who wants to know anyway?
--- not proof read yet... 11/28/04
Dreams are easy to forget. But the stuff dreams are made of are not. I
started to record my dreams in summer 2001 after I saw a 50 Austrian Schilling
(ATS) bill on a refrigerator at a party in Brooklyn. I was wondering about
the decorative functions of Austrian money in the USA. I was told Sigmund
Freud is depicted on it. This was a surprise to me, after using this money
for so many years without being aware of it. I soon learned that many
fellow Austrians ignored this little fact as well. I found it peculiar
and indicative of Freud’s writing itself. With the looming introduction
of the new European currency, Austrian legal tender was doomed to disappear.
The remaining eight months of Freud’s paper image in the hands, pockets,
cash registries and banks of Austrians, I used to create this dream-farming
artwork entitled Das Zählen der letzten Tage der Sigmund Freud Banknote,
translated as The counting of the last days of the Sigmund Freud money.
For this work I tried to remember my dreams and write them down as quickly
and accurately as I could, often at the “scene of the crime”,
i. e. in bed, sometimes shaken up by a nightmare. Since I am not trained
in figurative depiction, dream notation was mostly done with words and
only sometimes accompanied by clumsy drawings. With the help of this scribbling
I was later able to carry some dream memory into the morning and transcribe
it more readably on the computer. I realized soon that this ‘immediate
writing down in bed’ was essential to recollection since dreams are
so fragile that even changes of my physical positions could liquidate
memory. Rereading my lose handwriting of single words and fragments of
sentences is even for me not easy since it often was done without light
in the middle of the night. Dreams with more dramatic texture wake me
usually up easily. The oneiric scenes could be so intense and colorful
that initial short-hand fixations appeared often falsely to be accurate.
With the partial or entire loss of dream content, at least, these meager
reminders were helping me to remember or reconstruct a dream for more
detailed writing on the computer. Our unconscious mind works with all
kind of tricks to secure deceptions and dream evaporation. For example:
I would dream to write down a dream and continued to sleep to discover
later in the morning that nothing was written at all. So-called lucid
dreams in which I dream-watched myself became frequent and I felt released
when this dreaming marathon stopped and I could let all my dreams just
pass by again unnoticed.
After having written down the dream with the computer, I checked the value
of the 50 ATS bill on the currency converter of CNN online. Simultaneously,
this online service volunteered a number of results of other currencies.
I complemented these listings with the economic data of two major US stock
indexes, the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq. At that moment, I also checked
how many books on Sigmund Freud were offered on Amazon.com and on Buecher.de,
a German equivalent to this US online bookseller. After printing a dream
with all the information on the same paper that contained the original
dream scribbles, I added the 50 ATS bill with Sigmund Freud’s face
on it. The production of these artworks was contingent on my dream activity,
i.e. no dreams - no works. In the period from July 1st to the end of February
when the actual currency stopped its circulation, I noticed 144 days of
dreaming. Thought mostly I slept at night, sometimes I also fell asleep
during the day and dreamt. Many works contain multiple dreams, since I
quite often dream several times a night. I experienced myself as a serial
dreamer.
This dream work had quite some effect on me. Before I started with it
I went ‘dream by dream’ and didn’t pay much attention to
my dreaming. I was not aware – to give an example – how much
I was dreaming of my native Austria where I haven’t been living since
1986 and of Vorarlberg, the region I grew up in, which I left behind in
1980. The amount of Vorarlbergian or Austrian dream background has been
a real surprise to me, I only became conscious when working through these
dreams. Even more intriguing is the fact that right now, years after I
have completed this work, I once again see it in a different light. At
the time of dream harvesting, I had limited understanding of how my former
personal relationships influenced me. A five yearlong relationship had
come to an end and I fell in love with a new girl friend, which featured
quite prominently in my dreams during the eight months of dream registering.
Even though I dreamt of my ex-girl friend from time to time, I was not
aware of her oneiric appearances during that period of dream accounting.
Rereading my dreams is quite an adventure evoking embarrassment and surprise
since I have forgotten most of the dreams.
Apart from my personal and professional live, my family history and all
the dream-gossip reflecting socializing and stress, people and personal
drama, there is also an important historical tragedy of catastrophic consequences
that entered this work. The duration of this project overlapped with the
events of September 11, 2001, the subsequent lethal anthrax letters and
others threats. These dramatic events did direct quite some of my dream
production mixing up news and paranoia, post-trauma symptoms and existential
nervousness. In these dream scenarios I featured in nearly all possible
roles: as victim of terrorism, as terrorist, as CIA agent, as victim of
anti-terror campaigns and so on. Terrorism and the overblown wars and
campaigns to counter terrorism resulted in gruesome and sickening images
paraded on TV that created unconscious and subtle effects also live at
night. Thus, the psychic collateral damage of 9/11 and the subsequent
War on Terror were leaving traces in quite some of the oneiric quilt I
left behind.
Dreams resist final interpretation but they are open to contextualization.
They also invite for extensions with associations and new narratives resulting
from the dream content remembered. In this work, I never tried to “interpret”
it in a classical sense. I didn’t want to “play Freud,”
but supplemented many dreams with accounts on the dream context. This
process of contextualization never ends due to the nature of language
and the endless turns our lives are taking. The difference between actual
dream narratives and contextualizations is not always clearly understood
by readers. For this work my dreams are not indicated as dreams and clearly
distinguished from contextual complements and associations. I like the
fluidity between these different layers of texts that prevent readers
from clearly pin-pointing a story, a fact or a person. This helps to create
a vaguely inconsistent narrative that constructs a space where a writing
subject passing as “me” emerges just to disappear again with
some extra-layers of stories.
Everybody can relate to dreams since dreaming is universally human. I
myself see my contextualizing explanations and dream associations just
as a first reading, compressing and decompressing stories, thus sending
subsequent readers into various directions. To a certain degree, any account,
including court papers or visually recorded facts are fictional by nature
of representation and gain reality only through context, through authority
and through the various laws that govern the construction of our daily
world as facts and reality. Recent American politics has good examples
of how facts – War with Iraq, terrorism, redistribution of wealth
to the wealthy, a looming economy, the criminal behavior of a president
and his administration, etc. – seem not to matter, in fact seem to
be up for endless spinning and political power games. In our society,
usually, dreams play no real part anymore in the construction of reality
– except one is in the well paying business of psychoanalysis. I
can “have a dream” of justice, a dream of being rich, of being
here or there, but all these dreams simply don’t create any actuality
after awakening. Or do they in the minds of people?
When it comes to corporate dreams the situation of reality construction
becomes a different ball game. “Dreamworks” and Hollywood fabricate
digital and celluloid dreams en masse that shape reality to a degree that
renders surreal reality real, at least for some as we could see in the
last Californian election. The dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger –
the most know Austrian after Hitler and Sigmund Freud - have come true.
Most marketers try to sell us pre-fabricated dream products of all sorts,
using dreaming as a seductive sales adjective. What a lot of these political,
business and advertisement schemes operating with words and visual ideas
of dreams don’t mention is the fact that many of our dreams are actually
nightmares – something that readers of my dreams will quickly notice.
Sigmund Freud himself sees in any regular dream an aspect of a Wunschtraum,
i.e. wishful dreaming, or wish fulfillment that is falsely translated
by my online dictionary as “pipe dream” or “great dream.”
This element of desire for material, social, ideological, psychological
and erotic realities in “great dreams” and less great ones reinforces
the intrinsic relationship of dreams and truth. Dreams fulfill in a very
individual, spontaneous and unmediated way the same reflective functions
utopias do for political and ideological tracing. In today’s world
of massively unfair and incredibly unequal distribution of resources,
dreams - cashed in or not - serve as colorful liquid pumped through all
political, economical and social systems globally. Thus, individual and
global dream worlds can be studied in the same way, cardiologists use
traceable fluids to detect cancerous cells.
Martin Luther King had a dream for which he had to pay with his life.
Dreams not only can be a threat to others but can also be quite repulsive
to our own psyche. The explosive amalgam of truth, desire and anti-gravitational
immateriality needs various mechanisms to be kept under control. This
is why many dreams go uncollected, unremembered, untold or become self-censored.
Self-censorship starts with the personal inability to remember stuff in
the first place, if one accepts the wildly known ideas of our personal
conscious/unconscious information economy. In my dream reporting, self-censorship
plays also a conscious role thought I tried to be as straightforward as
possible. But I do remember some instances of balancing the consequences
of disclosing certain details about others and myself against an implicit
notion for authenticity and artistic responsibility for truth. In a couple
of alienating dreams with embarrassing or too painful contextualizing
associations I opted for wandering vagueness and blurring oblivion. In
some instances I also switched between languages something that usually
wasn’t related to self-censorship. The question of (self-) censoring
also plays a role in selecting the material to be printed in this volume
since we can afford only 100 works to be reproduced. I delegate this selection
mostly to the editor of this series in order not to self-censor myself.
An ineffective naive way of dealing with this issue of self-censorship
is similar to hiding tactics of children who close their eyes and believe
that they are not visible anymore. At this point of writing this text
there is a refusal on my part to re-read this material. It feels as if
I don’t want to regain yet an additional view on the state of these
eight months of oneiric self-observation. I hesitate to be reminded of
these dreams. I am reluctant to see what was going on in my life at the
time of dream recording. I vacillate to see two life-defining love stories
blend into each other and diverge. It is painful to see love, loved once
and oneself change and time pass. It is unheimlich to suddenly recognize
conflicts of current the relationship already inscribed in the very euphoria
of early love where problems are simply not visible. Also, the events
and after-events of 9/11created a schism that did away with a political
innocence nobody really wanted to anticipate. Today, we really don’t
want to remember or even project yet another attack of even larger magnitude
and destruction. Hollywood and politicians whose lifeblood is fear are
painting that for us. In analogy to Sigmund Freud’s death drive,
one could wonder whether it doesn’t make sense to speak of a drive
to forget, a drive of oblivion and ignorance. “Who wants to know
anyway?” Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the fiercest protagonists
to advocate oblivion and make it a human virtue. In political and public
life, the power to forget – and to keep others from remembering –
as well as the power to ignore are vital instruments to stay in power
or to grab power. Personal heuristics fortunately/unfortunately follows
the same path. We don’t want to remember loss and painful things.
I hope that very few people will actually read these small and often badly
written writings. Finally, readers will read it their way, mix in their
own memories, their own dreams and lives and my stories will hopefully
defuse.
Indeed, the actual quality of the writing is peculiar to say the least.
There are plenty of orthographical, lexical and grammatical mistakes,
which had not been edited out. For multiple reasons of which some are
addressed throughout this introduction, I prefer not to reread neither
my emails, nor many of these dream texts. This “write and run”
style approaching sometimes a nearly incomprehensive ‘anything goes’
attitude may also be explained by the fact that I’m not a native-speaker
and depend on editors that are not available so easily. This doesn’t
only apply to English but also to German, my so-called mother tongue,
though my mother spoke Vorarlbergian dialect, which is not written officially
and which is in many ways quite distant from standard German. To address
this subject more accurately, I only remember the Vorarlbergian voice
of my father and not that of my mother. My mother passed away in a violent
vertical way of her own choice when I was fourteen. To this day, I have
no acoustic memory of her. I cannot remember her voice and don’t
recall a single sentence, a single word she uttered. For me, dealing with
proper grammar and correct spelling in my “teachers tongues”
feels authoritarian and rule governed. I also found out that if I ignore
orthographical rules consequently enough, I might get away with it. Getting
away with things had always played a crucial role in my life, since there
had been many issues to escape from. I like to playfully name my practice
of learning many foreign languages – currently Chinese and Arabic
- as a “running away from my mothers tongue.” Many of my dreams
come in multiple languages or at least, get mediated, caught and objectified
in German, English or in some other language – depending mostly on
the dream context. We know that dreams may occur even in languages that
don’t exist if that is our dream, or if we cathect a word that doesn’t
exist. More or less evenly I wrote out dreams in English and in German
and was never really aware of why this or that language offered itself
for use. It just occurred so. I was often switching linguistic codes and
mixed them up even within a single sentence. This most likely is a product
of the fact that I have been living outside a German speaking country
since 1986. In New York, my use of German is limited. I don’t evade
the German language as did Louis Wolfson with his mother tongue. This
great New York writer learned many languages in order to refuse to speak
English, his mother tongue. Opposite to me, he is very eloquent about
the voice of his mother which he hated. He wrote the telling fabulous
two books called “Ma mère musicienne est morte” (My mother
muscian is dead) and “Le schizo et les langues.” (The schizo
and languages)
Recording my dreams appeared to me as having been interviewed by myself
with little interferences. Like in good interviews, for this “neuro-matic”
viewing no questions were necessary. Questioning narratives of dreams
is little desirable since desires rule our libidinal empire of dreams.
The answers are of a similar material: Obsessive exaggerations and possessive
distortions, paranoid constellations of freeze framing and threat, the
ever returning, all too natural drive for sexual ludism and seduction
as well as delirious and twisted social interplay and intrigue. The word
“inter-viewing” is very accurate for dreaming, which delivers
mostly images of our cathexes, our mental energy directed towards a particular
idea or object.
Money is one of the most prominent cathected objects there is. This is
in as far interesting that money is in an off itself more or less worthless
and has value only when exchange is possible. Exchange doesn’t need
to be effective but needs to be optional. The day, after I finished this
dream work, nobody - except the Austrian National Bank - accepted anymore
the Austrian Schilling as legal tender since this role was passed on to
the Euro. According to Talcott Parsons and Nicolas Luhmann, money is a
symbolically generalized medium of value and exchange and shares this
quality with other media. I am now interested to project money onto dreams
and ignore for a while the usual way money and dreams are associated together
when we “dream of money.” Not only money is a medium, so are
dreams. Since ancient times, dreams were interpreted and were looked as
messengers of gods. Before Freud institutionalized psychoanalysis and
made out of dreaming a cottage industry dreams already communicated the
wishes of god, the state of minds and were considered informative for
the health of people and communities. Money enlarges the possibilities
of exchange and frees transactions from temporal, material and social
constraints. Dreams worlds too are unlimited in their actions and timing
and cross social, economic, ideological and sexual boundaries frequently.
If capitalism can be reductively paraphrased as making money with other
people’s money, work and time, dreams too make use of the full scope
of imaginable and unimaginable instruments, protagonists, actions, interactions
and settings.
The very structure of money is based on scarcity. In cases where money
is easily accessible to everybody without consequences not much is there
to be exchanged, as it was the case in former communist countries. In
other precarious situations where plenty of money is in circulation, the
currency is worth little and inflation can render it less relevant. In
such circumstances, significant exchange resumes without paper money of
that given currency. Scarcity of money is therefore an intrinsic element
for the proper functioning of money, which brings to my mind the omnipresent
structure of dreams as Wunschtraum, the dream in which we desire and want
something. Money and dreams are therefore perfect bed fellows in our wishing
system. The discrepancy between reality and dreams concerning the allocation
of wealth, love, time, space, justice, power and everything else is most
likely one of the driving force in oneiric ambitions. Mocking the world
of material differences, one might ask, “what’s the point of
dreaming if you have got it already?” It is difference that powers
our dreams and the world in which we dream.
Money as a generalized medium of communication has the powerful capacity
to establish relationships between diverse and non-comparable things.
Money is therefore a unifying element of difference without eliminating
or excluding differences. The most unrelated and incompatible facts, situations,
objects and people may converge into relationships with the help of monetary
instruments or the pure imagination of them. This became very apparent
in the insurance files of the world trade center disaster, also a major
stage in my dreams which tagged prices not only onto lost and destroyed
property but also onto lives and future lives of people who were killed.
This integral function of money with its high degree of generalization
finds its equivalent again in dreams, which too ignore facts, times, geographies,
borders, habits, social orders and politics. Anyone could indulge in delirious
dreams about princess Diana though she is not anymore among the living
and inaccessible. Dreams are made of decoy materials that render libidinal
energies and vibrations promiscuous and versatile. We often see alliances
in dreams that would be impossible but desirable or abject and unthinkable
in real life. Dreams flow in liquids that are as lubricated as money.
Actual money – cash or more to the point: cash flow - is today already
anachronistic and will soon be not only irrelevant in business but also
more likely even prohibited for tax and “security” reasons.
Money is about to be stripped naked of all materiality and will become
pure information and fully transparent. In the near future, we will stop
using money and checks and only deal with wire transfers and bank and
debit cards of all kinds. Already, it is impossible to purchase airplane
tickets without a credit card, and nearly impossible to make phone calls
in Europe without a plastic card. More and more machines want to be fed
with machine codes and electronic ID chips only. These monetary interfaces
are about to learn to communicate without any visual or physical contact
to a scanner. I wonder whether this explosion in environmental interactive
intelligence in which pecuniary transactions and information play vital
roles doesn’t soon turn into nightmares? From a subjective point
of view, wiring money or debiting a purchase with plastic may feel like
having the limbic regions of the brain, responsible for emotional and
emotive matters, communicate with the prefrontal cortex that houses our
working memory, our attention unit, and our logic and self-monitoring
center – all functions that are suspended during the dream enriched
time of REM sleep with Rapid Eyes Movements.
For Nicolas Luhmann, money is in the center of an economic theory that
is dominated by “improbable communication” which has as its
binary code payment and non-payment. The economy is therefore seen as
the totality of all contingent necessary and non-necessary, executed and
non-executed payments. The problem of money is an integral part in this
game of probabilities that determines acceptance or refusals of economical
communications, i.e. payment or non-payment. The experience of contingency,
of the choice to buy or not to buy, to pay or not to pay, to sign on or
not, regulates not only prices but also implies a high degree of (market)
observation and self-observation. It was therefore not arbitrary that
I added the value of the money at issue and other key economic factors.
In the world of anti-gravitational dreaming, probability is not a non-issue.
We still dream that we want to escape the monster or killer and are petrified
and unable to escape. Last summer in East Hampton, a telling nightmare
was reported by a six year old daughter of one of my few rich friends.
The little girl awoke from a dream in which her parents lost all her money
in exchange for poverty. Her unfortunate dream might have been inspired
by my fascination for such a fabulous villa or by the fact that on that
famous peninsula, not a single stone goes without a big exuberant price
tag. In East Hampton, people don’t “own houses,” they are
“in the market.” Wish-fulfillment is disguised in such a case
dialectically through the fear of loss. The dream-come-true vacation situation
creates new nightmares when confronted with people living realities in
which non-payment options are the dominant ones.
Of course, economic transactions are observed and consumed even by people
who are excluded from direct participation. Luhmann even paraphrases Marcel
Duchamps’s famous grave inscription that reads “D’ailleurs,
ce sont toujours les autres qui meurent…” (but it is always
others who die) He says, “Die Wirtschaft – das sind immer die
anderen” - The economy – is always made by others. This market
transparency is important for the market to function. Others therefore
join and participate even thought they might not be able to enter the
payment/non-payment game. Price structures and economic volumes help us
to orient and to position ourselves in this sea of possible payments and
non-payments. Presenting here my dreams to a public constitutes for me
some kind of an embarrassment that I try to hide behind this abstract
introduction and my quasi-refusal to even re-read my own dreams. As I
mentioned earlier, because they are products of my lived background and
existential patterns, these dreaming recordings are communicating residues
of the primal pleasure and pain, the original comfort and stress that
this stuff is made of. Live goes on and we don’t want to always know
about it. I refuse to be fully aware of how much intimate and personal
details I disclose about myself, my family and my social circle. I’m
also concerned that these dream writings and post-oneiric associations
could hurt the feelings of others, addressed in this work, something that
will create a new layer of conflicts. Luhmann, like Parsons could be accused
of paying relative little attention to conflicts, crisis and all those
social situations where the euphemisms of a unifying system theory appears
out of sync with non-anticipated ruptures of rule governed behaviors and
wars. In my dreams as well as in life, conflicts are everywhere and I
wonder whether I am just an artist or a nocturnal worrier. Today, the
optics of dream literature is well domesticated and room is provided to
accommodate the colorful expressions of “primitive, sexual and aggressive
impulses” – as academic books sometimes put it. Dreamers, writers
and artists get thus some bourgeois apologetic nimbus to function as pathetic,
neurotic, paranoid and enlightened informer on contemporary society. Without
being limited to dreaming, these figures are even expected to create bizarre
imagery, suspend current logics, shift attentions, and morphing times,
places, identities and histories.
Not because of this Narrenfreiheit, the jester’s license, I finally
want to point out that the vanished Sigmund Freud on the Austrian money
was also a reminder of the fact that not too many decades earlier he was
forced to leave Austria. Nazi-Austria was voluntarily part of a real and
murderous nightmarish regime that should never be forgotten. The fact
that I wasn’t aware of this historical figure on the 50 ATS bill
was for me shocking and is now seen by me as symptomatic for the Austrian
way to deal with its own history for many years. This brings us back to
the question “Who wants to know anyway?” Even though I have
studied quite a bit of this history and did all kind of extra “home
work” in finding out, I still haven’t asked all the questions
possible concerning my own parents and grand parents. Do I dare to know?
Do we want Verdrängung, repression? If Paul Celan is known for saying
“Death is a master from Germany,” I might add, “Repression
is a master from Austria” without suggesting that Austrians played
a reduced role in the 20th century’s industry of death. For this
publication, I asked Paul Mattick as well as Sylvère Lotringer
to contribute a text of their own choice. Lotringer, how leads the life
of a multi-coastal somnambulist, has written extensively on art and philosophy
and has worked with me on other publications in the past. Mattick is an
art historian and critic and has extensively published on economics, critical
theory, art and money. By accident, these two writers and friends have
their own history with Nazi-Europe. Lotringer was persecuted as a Jewish
child in Nazi-occupied France and had to hide under a fake Christian identity
with a adopted, but existing name in a different geographic region away
from his family. Mattick’s parents were forced to flea Austria and
emigrated to the USA where he was born. None of these biographical facts
played a deciding role for the commissioning of their texts.
I want to conclude this introduction with the statement that we are always
part of a historical process and that the writing of history and histories,
is political as well as part of history itself. The Austrian contribution
to the iconography of the new multinational Euro doesn’t include
any indication to its recent history anymore. Though different national
icons are still present on Euro coins without any monetary significance,
this new European currency stands for the departure from national currencies.
The creation of a unified European market with a unified denationalized
currency seems to be the solution to new globalized conditions where productions,
(intelligent) labor, and capital flow relatively freely. The Euro symbolizing
the results of the ideas and the politics of the European Union are also
to be seen as an answer to centuries of national slaughtering and chauvinistic
competitions. Rests only the cardinal question whether this new European
economic course – with not even everybody on board – will trigger
the necessary political and ideological unifications that are crucial
to make Europe a functioning entity that will be able to withhold destructive
pressures from within as well as from outside. As a bitter reminder of
the past, we should not ignore that since the reinvigorated implementation
of a unified European zone has become a reality, reactionary political
forces are regaining momentum. Neo-nationalisms, xenophobia, racism, the
structurally biased inability and refusal to the full economic, cultural
and ideological integration of its large, mostly Muslim immigrant population
and cold blooded right wing radicals engaging in violent actions could
gain such explosive power that again, a new kind of money could –
hopefully not - become a nightmarish reality. Over the last hundred years,
Austria has changed its currency five times Ð and we know why. Money echoes
politics, and so do many of my dreams.
November 2005
index
texts
exhibitions
at baumgarnter with dreams
some of these dreams: click
|