Academic literature on the topic 'Productive melancholia'

This article takes the position that our contemporary overheated media environment lends itself to comfortable passivity, resulting in mental breakdown in the guise of the dark emotions: anxiety, melancholia and boredom. This is especially the case with the inevitable synergy of the upcoming technological transformations from genetic modification, virtual reality simulacra and artificial intelligence/robotics. After discussing the data from the World Health Organization regarding the stark increase of people across the globe suffering from depression and anxiety, this article weds the concepts of McLuhan’s hot–cool distinction with Fromm’s delineation of the productive character orientation. Following Fromm, this article argues that joy ensues from reason, productive labour and love–sorrow from ignorance, alienated work and indifference. When we wilfully abrogate our responsibilities to self and other via non-participational mediated forms, we cede away our potential for growth and development. This leads to the emotional breakdowns of guilt, boredom, anxiety and melancholia. Viktor Frankl’s logotherapeutic perspective is discussed as a counterbalance to the social effects wrought by our overheated technological environment. Frankl’s stress on phenomenological meaning as the cornerstone of existence provides a lens to understanding the affects of an over-reliance on technological gadgetry.

This essay applies the concept of postimperial melancholia, taken from the work of Paul Gilroy, to describe the affective undercurrents of medieval text editing in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first through an example from Beowulf. The discussion is focalized through the emendations to line 1382a, where an ambiguous series of minims leads to different editorial choices in Klaeber's first three editions of the poem, in his second supplement to the third edition, in the fourth edition produced by R. D. Fulk, Robert D. Bjork, and John D. Niles, and in Kevin Kiernan's Electronic Beowulf. The emendation proposed by Klaeber in his second supplement is imbricated in the shameful history of Old English studies and the project of constructing legendary origins for whiteness. Kiernan and the fourth edition editors each reject Klaeber's reading without addressing this history, focusing attention instead on technological and methodological interventions that produce other readings which are then represented alongside Klaeber's. The result is representative of how the closed and nonrecuperative temporality of melancholia is manifest in the principal development of postwar medieval text editing more generally, which is the abandonment of the notion that scholarly interventions constitute progress toward a better representation of a text, in favor of imagining them as expansions of a spatialized critical field around nodes of dissent. The essay concludes that the best way forward for the field is to recognize its melancholia and its causes, so that it might contribute to more productive futures.

A Melancholic Croquis is based on the motifs of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and its eponymous film adaptation by Luchino Visconti. The director Matej Filipčič conceived the project as a unique synthesis of a theatre performance, a scientific experiment and a social event. The article focuses on this triple connection, the specifics of the project’s content, form and production. It first explains the thematic deviation from the original: the performance does not foreground the artist and his being torn between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but centres on melancholy, which Filipčič recognises as melancholic and defines experientially as an equation of both principles. The original motifs are present but are of secondary significance since the question no longer concerns a philosophical deliberation on the ways of achieving beauty but rather the staging of an ambience, experience itself and the possibility of recording the spectator’s emotional responses. Why? Because a melancholic is a person par excellence clinging to time and enclosed by time, able to ‘fight’ against the fleeting and the fleetingness of time with only one weapon: a series of questions that force creative persons (artists, philosophers, scientists) towards creative acts, into which Filipčič constantly inserts memories, intertwining the personal and the collective, placing the particular in the universal that is valid here and now. The article also traces the fundamental building blocks of Filipčič’s staging process: the poetics of memory, the use of a croquis and a concern for communicativeness, which are read through A Melancholic Croquis.

How do scientists and experts in marginal scientific fields think about themselves, their knowledge production, and their practices in relation to dominant sciences? In this article, drawing on fieldwork with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, I argue that what motivates much of the training, practice, and thought of some contemporary psychoanalysts is their place as practicing a minor science in relation to dominant forms of psychiatry and neuroscience in the United States. They are exemplary marginalized experts who articulate themselves and their work against mainstream forms of neuroscientific and psychiatric expertise. I adopt the concept of minor sciences from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who characterize them by their eminently political nature, their challenging of dominant sciences through intensive uses of language, and their disenfranchisement. Yet Deleuze and Guattari are relatively silent on the experiential qualities of practicing minor sciences. I turn to Sigmund Freud’s distinction of mourning and melancholia in relationship to lost objects, suggesting that one of the constituent components of minor sciences is a persistent state of melancholy related to the minor sciences’ struggling for relevance. Drawing on my fieldwork with a Lacanian community and their interest in who and what belongs to psychoanalytic thought, what threats endanger the status of psychoanalysis, and what is at stake in keeping psychoanalysis alive in the United States, I suggest that the power of melancholia proves vital to keeping minor sciences alive for marginalized experts.

In this article, Justin Grinage investigates how black youth experience and contest racial trauma using racial melancholia, a psychoanalytic conception of grief, as a framework for understanding the nonpathologized endurance of black resistance to racism. Examining data from a yearlong ethnographic study, Grinage engages the notion that melancholia is needed for mourning to take place, a crucial distinction that engenders agency in relation to the constant (re)production of racial oppression in the lives of five black twelfth-grade students at a multiracial suburban US high school. Grinage illustrates how racial melancholia structures racial trauma and analyzes its effects on black identity, dismissing pathologizing definitions of racial injury while centralizing the importance of asset-based, healing-centered approaches for enacting racial justice in education.

In the essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, Deleuze discusses the differences between nineteenth-century capitalism and contemporary capitalism, characterising the former as the spaces of enclosure and the latter as the open circuits of the bank. In contemporary capitalism, ‘[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt’ ( Deleuze 1992 : 6). Deleuze claims that under financial capitalism, where the primary use of money is self-generation, economic relations are thought in terms of an asymmetrical power relationship between debtor and creditor, rather than an exchange between commodities. Taking up Deleuze's claim, this paper analyses how time functions in the formation of subjectivity under financial capitalism, by focusing on the temporal structure of debt. The indebted are expected to bind themselves to the past, not only in the moment they make a promise to pay back, but from that moment onwards; in this process, a subject finds himself passively subjected to the temporality determined by the condition of indebtedness, and yet he also actively reproduces and imposes the fact of indebtedness on himself by the feeling of guilt. Guilt, arising from the irreversibility of what has been done and resulting in the inability to proceed into the future, is central both to the indebted and the melancholic. Thus a melancholic subject emerges: a subject conditioned by the dominance of the past and the impossibility of the future.

This manuscript, per the author, will explain “Environmental Melancholia” and “Collective Social Mania,” and describe how they are connected in a hedonic loop of capitalism and buyer's remorse. This manuscript will also explain the role of symbolism and symbolic acts in healing one's grief, and the connection it has to art. The materials used in the artwork, Relentless Memorial, reference the unyielding pollution and mass production of goods created by the petroleum industry, as well as creating a dichotomy between a clean, white, virgin plastic to an ever-increasingly polluted, contaminated world. The formal presentation of Relentless Memorial as an installation is intended to provide a place of contemplation and mourning. Furthermore, the presentation of the installation as a panorama is related to the phenomenon of panoramas of the nineteenth century, and the onset of environmental pollution during the industrial revolution of that time. It invites a layered investigation into how that industry has influenced the environmental melancholia felt by society today.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-02-01T18:31:39Z No. of bitstreams: 1 joycescoralicksilvestre.pdf: 583670 bytes, checksum: 4b1eb2d6b774d02bae8a12a4bd67628e (MD5)
Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-02-01T20:15:08Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 joycescoralicksilvestre.pdf: 583670 bytes, checksum: 4b1eb2d6b774d02bae8a12a4bd67628e (MD5)
Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-02-01T20:15:19Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 joycescoralicksilvestre.pdf: 583670 bytes, checksum: 4b1eb2d6b774d02bae8a12a4bd67628e (MD5)
Made available in DSpace on 2016-02-01T20:15:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 joycescoralicksilvestre.pdf: 583670 bytes, checksum: 4b1eb2d6b774d02bae8a12a4bd67628e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-20
Este trabalho tem como objetivo um exame da produção de literatura como uma resposta aos enfrentamentos e aos afetos experimentados pelo escritor. O artista, com seu caráter essencial de encontrar-se muito presente e próximo daquilo que o cerca, será aquele que percebe e recebe as mudanças que ocorrem, em especial na modernidade, e encara o desolamento que elas provocam por sua própria essência e transporta tais desassossegos para sua produção: arte. Na modernidade o homem vê-se lançado em uma globalização sem precedentes que, entre outras coisas, o lança a uma solidão em que é preciso mudar os valores tão rapidamente quanto a época o exige. No caso específico do livro estudado, Fernando Pessoa construiu no Livro do Desassossego aquilo que o heterônimo a quem é atribuída sua autoria (Bernardo Soares) chama de uma espécie de biografia “sem fatos”. É através dessa biografia sem fatos que Soares se coloca como um alguém que necessita escrever para dar conta das melancolias que o assaltam, mostrando, assim, que escrever funciona como clínica de suas dores: tais dores que são bastante próprias dele, e não se confundem com as dos outros heterônimos, nos denotando mais uma característica da modernidade: a fragmentação e a busca incessante por algo que seja possível chamar sempre de “eu”.
This paper aims at presenting an examination of the production of literature as a response to the confrontation and the affections experienced by the writer. The artist, with his essential characteristic to find himself very present and close to what surrounds him, will be the one who understands and receives the changes that occur, particularly in modernity, and face the overwhelming that these changes cause by their very essence and he carries such disquiet to his production: art. In modernity, man sees himself released in an unprecedented globalization, among other things, the launches him into a loneliness in that changings the values are needed as quickly as the moment requires. In the specific case of the studied book, Fernando Pessoa built in Livro do Desassossego what the heteronym to whom its authorship is attributed (Bernardo Soares) calls a kind of biography "without facts". It is through this biography without facts that Soares is placed as someone who needs to write to deal with melancholy that assaults him, showing thus that writing functions as a treatment for his pain: such pains that are quite his, and not to be confused with those of other heteronyms, show one more feature of modernity: fragmentation and the incessant search for something that would be possible to always call "I".

Between 1916 and 1928 Dr Louis Fourie, Medical Officer for the Protectorate of South West Africa and amateur anthropologist, amassed a collection of some three and a half thousand artefacts, three hundred photographs and diverse documents originating from or concerned with numerous Khoisan groups living in the Protectorate. He gathered this material in the context of a complex process of colonisation of the area, in which he himself was an important player, both in his official capacity and in an unofficial role as anthropological adviser to the Administration. During this period South African legislation and administration continued the process of deprivation and dehumanisation of the Khoisan that had begun during the German occupation of the country. Simultaneously, anthropologists were constructing an identity for the Khoisan which foregrounded their primitiveness. The tensions engendered in those whose work involved a combination of civil service and anthropology were difficult to reconcile, leading to a form of melancholia. The thesis examines the ways in which Fourie’s collection was a response to, and a part of the consolidation of, these parallel paradigms. Fourie moved to King William’s Town in South Africa in 1930, taking the collection with him, removing the objects still further from their original habitats, and minimising the possibility that the archive would one day rest in an institution in the country of its origin. The different parts of the collection moved between the University of the Witwatersrand and a number of museums, at certain times becoming an academic teaching tool for social anthropology and at others being used to provide evidence for a popular view of the Khoisan as the last practitioners of a dying cultural pattern with direct links to the Stone Age. The collection, with its emphasis on artefacts made in the “traditional” way, formed a part of the archive upon which anthropologists and others drew to refine this version of Khoisan identity in subsequent years. At the same time the collection itself was reshaped and re-characterised to fit the dynamics of those archetypes and models. The dissertation establishes the recursive manner in which the collection and colonial constructs of Khoisan identity modified and informed each other as they changed shape and emphasis. It does this through an analysis of the shape and structure of the collection itself. In order to understand better the processes which underlay the making of the Fourie Collection there is a focus on the collector himself and an examination of the long tradition of collecting which legitimised and underpinned his avocation. Fourie used the opportunities offered by his position as Medical Officer and the many contacts he made in the process of his work to gather artefacts, photographs and information. The collection became a colonial artefact in itself. The thesis questions the role played by Fourie’s work in the production of knowledge concerning the Bushmen (as he termed this group). Concomitant with that it explores the recursive nature of the ways in which this collection formed a part of the evidentiary basis for Khoisan identities over a period of decades in the twentieth century as it, in turn, was shaped by prevailing understandings of those identities. A combination of methodologies is used to read the finer points of the processes of the production of knowledge. First the collection is historicised in the biographies of the collector himself and of the collection, following them through the twentieth century as they interact with the worlds of South West African administrative politics, anthropological developments in South Africa and Britain, and the Khoisan of the Protectorate. It then moves to do an ethnography of the collection by dividing it into three components. This allows the use of three different methodologies and bodies of literature that theorise documentary archives, photographs, and collections of objects. A classically ethnographic move is to examine the assemblage in its own terms, expressed in the methods of collecting and ordering the material, to see what it tells us about how Fourie and the subsequent curators of the collections perceived the Khoisan. In order to do so it is necessary to outline the history of the discourses of anthropologists in the first third of the twentieth century, as well as museum practice and discourse in the mid to late twentieth century, questioning them as knowledge and reading them as cultural constructs. Finally, the thesis brings an archival lens to bear on the collection, and explores the implications of processing the collection as a historical archive as opposed to an ethnographic record of material culture. In order to do this I establish at the outset that the entire collection formed an archive. All its components hold knowledge and need to be read in relation to each other, so that it is important not to isolate, for example, the artefacts from the documents and the photographs because any interpretation of the collection would then be incomplete. Archive theories help problematise the assumption that museum ethnographic collections serve as simple records of a vanished or vanishing lifestyle. These methodologies provide the materials and insights which enable readings of the collection both along and across the grain, processes which draw attention to the cultures of collecting and categorising which lie at the base of many ethnographic collections found in museums today. In addition to being an expression of his melancholy, Fourie’s avocation was very much a part of the process of creating an identity for himself and his fellow colonists. A close reading of the documents reveals that he was constantly confronted with the disastrous effects of colonisation on the Khoisan, but did not do anything about the fundamental cause. On the contrary, he took part in the Administration’s policy-making processes. The thesis tentatively suggests that his avocation became an act of redemption. If he could not save the people (medically or politically), he would create a collection that would save them metonymically. Ironically those who encountered the collection after it left his hands used it to screen out what few hints there were of colonisation. Finally the study leads to the conclusion that the processes of making and institutionalising this archive formed an important part of the creation of the body of ethnography upon which academic and popular perceptions of Khoisan identity have been based over a period of many decades.

Chapter 2 demonstrates the depth to which rhizomatic analysis can be utilized with a single sound and word: Hû. I study Hû as a sound, as instrument technique for the end-blown reed flute, the ney, as sacred embodiment, and as representative of the city of Istanbul. This chapter also offers a history of Sufism in relation to contemporary Turkish classical music production. This chapter challenges secular discursive and theoretical frameworks used to analyze Turkish classical music as I focus on Hû as a case study to demonstrate how we can identify spirituality and melancholy in something as small as a single sound.

In Chapter 1, the Reformation is presented as the paradigmatic site of Gothic escape: the evil monastery can be traced back to Wycliffe’s ‘Cain’s castles’ and the fictional abbey ruin to the Dissolution. Central Gothic tropes are shown to have their origin in this period: the Gothic heroine is compared to the female martyrs of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; the usurper figure is linked to the papal Antichrist; and the element of continuation and the establishment of the true heir is related to Reformation historiography, which needs to prove that the Protestant Church is in continuity with early Christianity—this crisis of legitimacy is repeated in the Glorious Revolution. Lastly, Gothic uncovering of hypocrisy is allied to the revelation of Catholicism as idolatry. The Faerie Queene is interpreted as a mode of Protestant Gothic and Spenser’s Una provides an allegorical gesture of melancholic distance, which will be rendered productive in later Gothic fiction.

Melancholy and troubled, Portrait of Jennie has elicited widely divergent responses. Its music—based on themes of Debussy as adapted by Dimitri Tiomkin and Jester Hairston—has been hailed as alternately innovative and regressive. Perhaps because the film was so different from previous productions and its fantasy-based story so vulnerable to disdain, Selznick turned to the score with unprecedented vigor, hoping to improve a production plagued by difficulties. Portrait became Selznick’s most ambitious scoring project, and its complexities resonate in an astonishing paper trail. Assembling Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical score through this archival trove shows how Selznick sought to come full circle in Portrait, returning to musico-cinematic principles drawn from the silent era.

God and the Gothic undertakes a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, now seen as usurpation of power by the authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part I interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe’s melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part II traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In Part III, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in Part IV, nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost-story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restores the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

The concluding chapter charts out potential critical links between Shakespearean comic melancholy and modern conceptualizations of melancholia in the works of Freud, Butler and Ngai. It argues that the comic philosophy of melancholy and of the melancomic, through its performative and affective dimensions, dovetails with the theoretical frameworks of all three writers. The chapter positions the representation of melancholy as a productive emotional marker akin to nostalgia in its conflation of sorrow and pleasure, as well as the artistic and creative repercussions that such a connection suggests over the years.

Chapter 2 begins by looking at how medical and cultural histories of melancholy and unhappiness have traditionally defined and diagnosed such feelings as negative, unhealthy, and undesirable, even while recognizing their potentially enabling features. Freud’s essay of 1917 is seen to mark a definitive moment when melancholia becomes fully pathologized. In response to this, the chapter turns to the work of Walter Benjamin, who attempts to mine new readings of melancholic experience (and criticism) that show the latter to be profoundly social, political, and productive. This places his work at odds with the prevailing consensus, which characterizes melancholia as a personal psychological failing that is stifling, passive, and anti-social. The chapter closes with a section on ‘conscious unhappiness’. Revisiting Theodor Adorno’s work, this section affirms the importance and interconnectedness of affective and political refusal. Rather than seeking to avoid or relieve dysphoric feelings through psychic adjustment, conscious unhappiness amplifies unmet needs, giving voice to the suffering that arises from a social world in need of wholesale transformation. As part of its revolutionary critique of capitalist social relations, critical theory refuses to privatize the notion of happiness and in so doing aligns itself with the (negative) truth-content of unhappiness – the bad that cannot be made good.

This chapter explores the place of clowns in the cultural production of Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, and how clowns embody and generate “spaces of melancholy.” The psychology that characterizes their work is ultimately a spatial, even allegorical one, in which Pierrots and Harlequins produce nightmarish dreamscapes, theatricalized temporalities, and extended sojourns among ruins—which Pero describes as melancholic camp.In considering camp from a psychoanalytic perspective, Pero argues that spaces like the sublime and the façade work to offer forms of encounter that are governed not by the superego, but by the ego. An ego-driven experience of the sublime makes it possible to transform sublimity, turning its terrifying disinterestedness in the human subject into a form of enjoyment. The “campian sublime” engages the sublime by making it a subject, by treating it as a riddle as “an enigma to be dissolved” rather than solved. The Sitwells’ melancholic camp is both historical and theatrical; the texts consider historical trauma as a form of theatricality and that a fidelity to decaying, neglected forms, such as the clowns of commedia dell’arte, open up what Sacheverell Sitwell, in a Benjaminian move, sees as the possibility of redemption in modernity.

Abstract This introduction shows how this book fits into the context of melancholic discourses in Iberian culture, art, and literature and across Europe more broadly. In other words, it aims to explicate what specific epistemic gap attempts to fill within the emerging interdisciplinary field of medical humanities. To do so, I establish a direct correlation between the literary production of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts I analyze and the cultural evolution in Iberian systems of thought. These foundational literary works, I contend, contain the seeds that cause the transition from a theocentric worldview to a humanistic one. Hence, I offer a summary of how the multifaceted condition of melancholia evolved across epochs and cultures, paying particular attention to the role Spain (Toledo in particular) played in the translation of Arabic medical treatises into Latin and the Castilian vernacular and the subsequent dissemination across Europe. The clinical literature, in turn, helped Iberian authors understand health and diseases through the inner workings of the human body, rather than the divine.

Abstract The concluding chapter examines the Alfonsine cantiga 188, a miracle that dramatizes the mystical melancholia of a young girl whose overpowering amor hereos for the Virgin Mary induces her to renounce the world in order to live in mystical union with the Virgin, her absent beloved. The mystical lovesickness that informs the maiden’s spirituality partakes in the mystical tradition spearheaded in Western culture by the Solomon Song of Songs, a biblical poem that King Alfonso translated into Spanish in General estoria, and followed by the literary production of the mystic Ramon Llull and other medieval accounts. The Wise King wrote two more cantigas (251 and 353) about mystical melancholia or the pursuits of a mystical union with God. Cantiga 188, though, stands out as a model of aesthetic virtuosity and dramatic thrust on account of its brevity and the overarching message that informs its riveting plot.

Published in 1975, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora emerged amid the onset of post-civil rights era politics of black respectability and neoliberal ideology and policies that rendered black communities and bodies paradoxically more “public” and “private.” This essay posits Jones’s novel as a corrective to these ideological and existential binds. Thinking through psychoanalytic theories of mourning and melancholia, queer of color theories of identity formation, and the work of black feminist scholars, this essay explores how Jones draws on the blues aesthetic to fashion a novel that accounts for the process of racial subject formation at the intersections of buried social memory and ongoing practices of racialization and underscores the individualistic contours of racial identity without stabilizing hegemonic discourses of racial ideology.

The radical aesthetic of the historical avant-garde movements has often been explained as a reaction to the catastrophic experience of the First World War and a denouncement of the bourgeoisie’s responsibility for its horrors. This article explores a blind spot in these familiar interpretations of the international avant-garde. Not only the violence of the World War but also the experience of a worldwide deadly pandemic, the Spanish flu, have moulded the literary and artistic production of the 1920s. In this paper, I explore this hypothesis through the example of Mário de Andrade’s famous book of poetry Pauliceia desvairada (1922), which I reinterpret in the light of historical studies on the Spanish flu in São Paulo. An in-depth examination of all parts of this important early opus of the Brazilian Modernism shows that Mário de Andrade’s poetic images of urban coexistence simultaneously aim at a radical renewal of language and at a melancholic coming to terms with a traumatic pandemic past.