Cut up, copy, remix, repeat
Practice/Process - Dr. Vanessa Sinclair
Our Practice/Process section is dedicated to insights into contemporary psychoanalytic, and psychoanalytic-adjacent practice, however broadly defined.
Here, we hope to offer some perspective on the personal motivations of practitioners, the mode in which they carry out their work, and their relation to the field at large, responding always to a rather pretentious question: do we practice psychoanalysis, or are we practiced by it?
In the first contribution to our Practice/Process section, Dr. Vanessa Sinclair shares a cut-up piece - Cut up, copy, remix, repeat - below:
Cut up, copy, remix, repeat
My practice is personal and very much of my own creation. The cut lies at the heart. Language allows for things to be halved by themselves. Another artist who utilizes the double as a consistent and central theme in exploring the architecture of the body, implores that if we adjust the physicality of the body, we concurrently adjust its awareness. Cut up, copy, remix, repeat. Particular conundrums will be solved and resolved. Our ruts – these narratives we have been told and which we now tell ourselves – we must dismantle them so that we may begin to think more freely, see other possibilities, and invent new significance. I must be careful, however, not to betray my illusions with this lingering sanity. Dreams merge waking reality with dream sequences and altered states, creating a disjoined experience inside the state of the viewer. As scenes cut from a hospital room to the early 21st-century, a revolutionary new style takes center stage, creating a new narrative.
Unconscious desires have been imposed upon us from the past, through the present, and into waking consciousness. Ideas appear and then may become again absent the next moment. They then may become present again after an interval, unchanged. Of the unconscious there is something that points to what occurs at the level of the subject – this thing speaks. And, of course, this is a recollection of events years after they took place. We have never been biological bodies, really. We have always been prosthetically augmented bodies. What it means to be human is… anatomical architectures interrogating issues of agency, identity, and the post-human. Cut up, copy, remix, repeat. We have always been interested in the human body. Many artists discuss, study, and question the nature of perceived reality through disrupting the traditional narrative. In fact almost all avant-garde art is unmoored in a sea of chaos and contradiction.
In our current age, we have cut-up, mashed, and rehashed our culture in so many ways that it’s quite impossible to separate out. Those ideas remain to this day. Utilizing mirrors, mannequins, masks, dolls, or puppets, some choose to fashion an image for themselves. The name I was given is not my name, it is my parents name for me. Our names are never our own. They come with legacies, desires, significations, and ghosts. In fact, the unconscious wasn’t created intentionally. The memoirs of Herculine Barbin were discovered. In traditional Freudian theory, the system Ucs is at a very early stage overlaid by the system Pcs, which has captured the means of access to consciousness and motility – the means of discharge. Living becomes tolerable via fantasy. This also explains why identity continues to inspire and be described. Cut up, copy, remix, repeat. The phrasing and the sentences that come together through this seemingly haphazard methodology seem to make a certain kind of sense.
Psychoanalytic treatment, in a way, allows us to access and acknowledge as much of ourselves as possible. Departing from the expected receives mixed reviews, of course. Become a master of your own narrative. I would choose no other field of work, in spite of all its difficulties. This version remains beyond our capacity for knowledge, for the weird unaccountable effects people have on one another. Postmodernism has not only successfully exposed and disrupted the hidden power dynamics of the master narrative, but produced a cultural dance. Cut up, copy, remix, repeat. The cutting has an effect on the psyche, as we experience ourselves through the interface of our bodies. The conception has been present in the mind although latent in consciousness. The cut-up was locked down on the Freudian couch.
From the Dadas to surrealists and contemporary artists of our day, many artists explore subjectivity, identity, gender, and sexuality through work with the double. And probably the immortal soul was the first double of the body. Do we dare to challenge it? Perhaps it may be a general characteristic of hallucinations to which sufficient attention has not hitherto been paid. A line of thought proceeds as follows: in them something that has been is subjected to knowledge and sanity. There are a variety of differences that they all share, repeating the logic of representation, existing somewhere between repetition and understanding. This corresponds with the making of a special record – a conception which we tried to employ as explaining the relation of consciousness to unconscious ideas. Cut up, copy, remix, repeat.
Film as an artistic medium has a way of invoking a particular experience in the audience. The machine can handle any sound, any expression. You just have to find the right edit. The student reached was this sort of patron. While I am my own presence, a language emerges from the dream sphere. The soundtrack is from a time when psychoanalysis would champion the obscure but indestructible intuitions of the common people against the arrogant assumed knowledge of bold new technology. Techniques were utilized and even integrated into the creation of artworks. They tried to destroy the sound. Thus an alliance of and collaboration between psychoanalysts and artists would seem to be both plausible and not fully grasped today. Currently, there is an entire field devoted to the art of sampling, remixing, and editing together of found sounds called remix. Our culture is so extensively permeated with its effects that it’s quite impossible to imagine what life was like before.
What happens when we break it down, disassemble it, cut it up? Memoirs, memories, dreams, and reflections recollect conversations about the study of psychoanalysis and unexplained phenomena, including the theory of childhood sexuality, development, desire, and drive. Critical life experiences, such as the death of loved ones, divorce, addiction, war, violence, and abuse, are shocking events represented in still-life motifs of high medieval painting, always ever reminding the viewer of the fragility of life. Bones discovered on daily walks are reassembled, pulling consciousness out of the real of the body and into the realm of her own world.
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