vampiric: displacement, investment

abstract

the vampiric is a mode which acknowledges that it is based on two quite interesting operations, procedures, or acts: on investment and on displacement. investment and displacement seem to be two notions which are already overburdened and sucked dry by their more or less strict contextual use. figuratively speaking the vampiric act of drawing blood requires a decision and beforehand a selection process: which blood (substance) does one want to draw, whom does one want (not) to transform... the result is not only a shifting of blood (substance) but also of identity membership, the important reproductive ability in a symbolic sense. the vampire is - so to say - a temporary displaced person, who has to make over and over investments being at the same time the creature an embodiment of an imaginary constellation. the vampiric as a model of choosing and biting could be understood and transfered into a model of reading and writing.

key words

vampiric modes of reading & writing - investment & displacement - literary production zone

txt

lets jump in a sudden way into how i want to develop this quite weird idea - to transfer a model (the vampiric), which is itself a model of transference - by starting like this:
if we think about the interrelations or interpolations of textual production, power and knowledge i will emphasize the side of the reader, not in the respect of reading as (passive) consumption but as an activity chosen (out of some sort of hunger) for nourishment and out of a certain thirst (whether the thirst is induced, triggered, has emerged or is just simply there for unknown reasons should now be of no concern in this context). that brings us close to something we could describe as vampiric characteristics and vampiric attitudes, patterns of compulsive repetitions and obsessive deals and strategies in the name and the search for one substance or another - something that will neither lead to life nor to death but to a state of existence referred to as "undead". which is the realm of production, the realm of the work of art, the book and other products which can be animated through processes of reading (including visual reading) that could also count for themselves as processes of production (=writing). reading is opening up, re/creating, animating.
according to maurice blanchot (1991; s. 25) it is exactly the task of reading to prevent the following: "sich nicht einzukapseln in der nichtigen einsamkeit des ideals", which i would translate as "not to encapsule oneself in the unworthy loneliness of the ideal". reading is primarily a process of communication with an otherwise closed and undead object. so that in consequence for blanchot (1991; s.11) a book that is read by noone is in fact a book thats not written yet, because in his view reading is making the book able to write itself and in this case without the mediating author.
michel de certeau in his book "the practice of everyday life" (1984; p. 169) put it like this: "the reader takes neither the position of the author nor an author's position. he (she jf) invents in texts something different from what they "intended". he (she jf) detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. he (she jf) combines their fragments and creates something un-known in the space organized by their capacity for allowing an indefinite plurality of meanings." in a society that is - as michel de certeau (1984; p. 167/168) wites - "increasingly written, organized by the power of modifying things and of reforming structures on the basis of scriptural models (whether scientific, economic, or political), transformed little by little into combined "texts" (be they administrative, urban, industrial, etc.), the binominal set production - consumption can often be replaced by its general equivalent and indicator, the binominal set writing-reading."
fast as my argument will proceed (and too fast maybe so that in the end you will not be sure of what i wanted to demonstrate because it is indeed still too fragile to make a stable structure, for sure not one you can step onto and wander around in) let me elaborate this point: if we accept this statement that we are currently living in a highly symbolically coded universe that makes the activities of reading and writing a constant necessity and we want to transfer the model of the vampiric to this situation, we could simplify and say: we are no longer living on blood, we are feeding on words. could we conceive ourselves as vampires feeding on words and in a constant need for this reassurement of our belonging to the symbolic? we as vampires are we as names feeding on words and membership. we as vampires are we as identity and identified beings not as selves. identity is the tomb out of which we raise every day and night to look for words to feed on them and gurantee a form which is undead but stable and which - staked through the heart, exposed to natural light - crumbles to dust and dis/appears. i am not sure about that though it is a tempting road to take and quite well paved compared to the one i will moveon...

as you can guess the problem with my argument is that i am unable to make proper distinctions between different things. it is quite blurred and sometimes it mixes up and the active fuses with the passive, reading becomes writing and writing reading and actually that may be in fact the most interesting outcome: that the shifts, transformations, memberships and (ex)changes are happening in a constant flux and at a speed which can no longer be described as roles or anything as stable as this.

the vampire is a temporary displaced person, a creature who no longer faces human time and human space and this is expressed in a quite triumphant fashion by the character eric draven in the film the crow (1993) - which is not really a vampire film, i know that - when he exclaimes: "i say: i am dead and i move."
i don't want to deal with the vampiric and the vampires in the way of the theoretical investments we have seen in the past decades in which vampires were quite useful: vampires as uncanny doubles, vampires as dangerously disrupting the social, sexual and political fabric, vampires and class, vampires and gender, vampires and power, vampires and sexual transgression, vampires and queerness, vampires as avengers or heroes or carriers of infection, contamination, disease or some other kind of unease. i want to treat the vampire as an embodiment of an attractive imaginary constellation that managed to survive (or did actually started to exist) through the belief that was invested in it. in a vampire genre film of the seventies ("blacula", 1972) there is a short dialogue illustrating what i want to emphasize here: the question: "do vampires exist?" is answered with "people believe so for thousands of years."
what interests me are the two operations, procedures, or acts on which the vampiric seems to build fundamentally: investment and displacement. applying sigmund freuds theoretical concept about investment energies (besetzungsenergien) (see: humberto nagera 1977; s. 394-412) the vampire is a creature who can not bind investment energies so that the vampiric he or she is doomed to very fluid energy income (sorry for the bad poetry) which has to be introduced into the system on a regular basis. so here we have the addiction idea of the vampiric on a psychic level: the vampire as a monster of emptiness eager to fill oneself in order to feel oneself. and it is exactly this "porosity" (das poroese) that mario perniola (1994; p. 103) describes as a special characteristic of the vampire: the ability to suck, to absorb, and to exist as a pseudo-living, empathetic, sensitive thing. perniola tries to show an analogy and also addresses the human being (=us) as "this undefinable and porose thing,which we became" ( "jenes unbestimmbare und poroese ding, das wir geworden sind"; perniola 1994; p. 104).
as you know freud sees displacement as the most important mechanism of the unconscious and of the primary process; in lacanian theory displacement is nothing but "metonymy". paul verhaeghe (1997; p. 15-19) describes displacement in a lacanian psychoanalytic way as a false connection, a neurotic knot - something that is on its way but not quite arrived, so to say. in an everyday context we will nowadays mostly use the word displacement connected to processes of migration.
angelika bammer (1994) understands displacement as "one of the most formative experiences". it is actually the experience "to be an other, to be displaced". displacement in this sense deals with issues of exile deprivation homelessness outsiderness alienation and in general with different kind of fragile connectedness. but displacement is not only a lived experience, it is also a theoretical (pardon me) signifier and a textual strategy. and: let's quote james clifford (1988, p.6) who writes that "people and things are increasingly out of place." and that (clifford; 1988; p.11): "intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees "inauthentic": caught between cultures, implicated in others." and thats the resumee that clifford comes to in dealing with the "poetics of displacement" in the writings of victor segalen (clifford; 1988; p. 163): "there is no escape; neither is there a stable home." and we have to face that it is more or less the status we exist in every day of our life in the 21^st century, as chantal mouffe phrases it (1988; p. 44): "but we are in fact always multiple and contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities (as many, really, as the social relations in which we participate and the subject-positions they define), constructed by a variety of discourses and precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of those positions." our multiple subject positions are facts and forms of displacement and relocation, acquired over time through complicated interactions of investment and forms of exchange. is it really appropriate to can we appropriate a term like "displacement" why not if we were able to appropriate so much before. at least ourselves and we can connect it through a chain of associations, an unconscious formation, association based upon contiguity, a displacement of energies (laplanche / pontalis, 1988; p. 121-124).

(interruption: can what we have to say only be said in this silvery liquid arguing against a much darker horizon of remembering what we did invest in and believed before. in fact we do become our own memory, someone to be remembered and presented as memory to total strangers who happen to have booked the same passage. made choices took chances came along came a long way.)

(last) if the author/writer could speak as her own book (mixing herself up, blending into the object which should act in the course of time and also spatial respect for her and understanding that literary is what shoshana felman (1993) called self-transgressive ) she would probably adress the reader with the following sentence - thus giving the frightening insight about the existence of the non-authorized txt a literal embodiment: "you partially invented me & that scares me so much."

thank you. sorry to puzzle you.

references

bammer, angelika (ed.): (1994) displacements. cultural identities in question. indiana university press.

blanchot, maurice: (1991) das unzerstoerbare. ein unendliches gespraech ueber sprache, literatur und existenz. edition akzente hanser.

botting, fred: (1991) making monstrous. frankenstein criticism theory. manchester university press.

certeau, michel de: (1984) the practice of everyday life. university of california press. berkeley.

clifford, james:(1988) the predictament of culture. harvard university press.

felman, shoshana: (1993) what does a woman want? reading and sexual difference. yale university press.

gordon, joan & veronica hollinger (eds.): (1997) blood read. the vampire as metaphor in contemporary culture. university of pennsylvania press harraway, donna:(1991) the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.

kristeva, julia: (1989) black sun. depression and melancholia. columbia university press.

kristeva, julia: (1982) powers of horror. an essay on abjection. columbia university press laplanche & pontalis: (1988) the language of psycho-analysis. p. 121-124. london: karnac books.

mouffe, chantal: (1988) radical democracy: modern or postmodern? p. 31-45. in: universal abandon? the politics of postmodernism. ed. andrew ross. university of minnesota press.

nagera, humberto (hg.): (1977) psychoanalytische grundbegriffe. eine einfuehrung in sigmund freuds terminologie und theoriebildung.

palmer, paulina: (1999) lesbian gothic. transgressive fictions. cassell.

perniola, mario: (1999) der sex-appeal des anorganischen. turia & kant.

rickels, laurence a.: (1999) the vampire lectures. university of minnesota press.

serres, michel: (1987) der parasit. suhrkamp wissenschaft.

stern, lesley: (1995) meditation on violence. p. 252-285. in: layleen jayamanne (ed.): kiss me deadly. feminism & cinema for the moment. university of sidney.

verhaeghe, paul: (1997) does the woman exist? rebus press

four (txt) leftovers:

.1

in his unfortunately too entertaining, too please-the-audience-oriented vampire lectures laurence rickels makes two interesting point: first (rickels, 1999; p. 19): the vampiric alternatives to circulation and substitution are, point by point, recycling and incorporation. and second: (rickels, 1999; p. 26): "it is this belief in the returns on our investments in circulation or substitution - it is the complete system of these beliefs - that vampirism inhabits and threatens." here the vampire is seen predominately as a parasitic existence misbehaving in the social virtues we are trained in

.2

in his book on the parasite michel serres (1980) makes the statement that he himself is not sure, if the parasite is a being or a relation and comes to the conclusion that beforehand the parasite is the elementary relation.

.3

quite opposite to one commonplace about vampiric life the vampire is sometimes quite eager to meet his or her own death, to escape eternal doom and eternal hunger - see for example the second blacula-movie "scream blacula scream" (1973), where pam grier as a voodoo "priestess" should help blacula to kill himself.

.4

let me finish for now with a rather cryptic quote from fred bottings book "making monstrous" (1991; p.18): "framing thus displaces the presumed presence of an authorial voice as it exposes the work of reading discourses which project and discover their own authority."

cv

judith fischer: m.a. (media science/philosophy, university of vienna, austria); works on a phd about visual representation of (women) reading (elisabeth von samsonow / academy of fine arts, vienna). 1999-2001 postgraduate research project at jan van eyck academy, maastricht/nl (vampiric modes of reading & writing, mentor: eva meyer); summer 2000: bauhaus kolleg (project "uncanny.unheimlich" with stevan vukovic; to be published as a book).
lit. books: innereien (visuals: christian hutzinger; 1994); mimose.schneckenhaus (dt; 1997); recherche snow white (dt./e; 1998); correspondence.korrespondenz (dt./e.; with eve wood, 1999).
jf writings/contributions 2000: u.a. infection manifesto no.3 (& exhibition, kunstverein bonn, juni/juli 2000); issues in contemporary culture and aesthetics no. 10/11: april 2000, p. 93-97: in one language or another. artificial txts: on the possible erosion of meaning; deliver. undated loose sheets. p. 42-43. in: catalogue smuggle/schmuggel/smokkel, fall 2000.
vampiric 2000: vampiric names (slides, txt, postcard; jve 2000), vampiric delightment (paper, symposion "what is enlightenment? chapter 2, jve, mai 2000; to be published in 2001); vampiric living (paper/reading, symposion kulturvermerke ooe, gmunden/a, 26-29.10.2000).