(Ordinary People, 1980)"I am now in mid-life and I have not seen a well day since I was about twelve years of age. Before I experienced any of the symptoms of agoraphobia I recall that a strange affliction came over me, an affliction that seemed to baffle the country doctors who were consulted. I was taken suddenly with 'spells' which lasted about thirty minutes. During these attacks I was entirely conscious and rational. As I remember the affliction, a sort of chill came over me-not like an ordinary chill, but a sort of 'coldness' that produced a very unusual sensation, or perhaps, a lack of sensation would describe it more accurately.
Later, perhaps a year or so, I commenced having a dread of wide fields, especially when the fields consisted of pasture land and were level, with the grass cropped short like the grass on a well-kept lawn. I likewise commenced to dread high things, and especially to ascend anything high. I even had a fear of crowds of people, and later of wide streets and parks.
I have outgrown the fear of crowds largely, but an immense building or a high rocky bluff fills me with dread. However the architecture of the building has much to do with the sort of sensation produced. Ugly architecture greatly intensifies the fear.
It is not pain that I feel, but it seems to me that it is more than a dread. I am not nervous, as some people whom I know -I mean in the same way, but it certainly is a case of 'nerves.' Let me illustrate:- I enter a home and sit in an arm-chair chatting with my friend; I soon find myself gripping the arm of the chair with each hand. My toes curl in my shoes, and there is a sort of tenseness all over my muscles.
Usually I feel better in the evening than in the morning, partly because the darkness seems to have a quieting effect upon me. I love a snow storm a regular blizzard, and feel much less discomfort in going about the town or riding on a train on such days, probably because one's view is obstructed. In fact I welcome stormy days, strange to say, with a zest that is hard to appreciate; in short, some of the most stormy days of the hard winters of this region stand out as bright spots in my life. On such days I make it a point to be out and about the town.
When I think of the agony which I have experienced for many years I am astounded at the endurance of the human spirit. Let me illustrate:- I have such a dread of crossing a long bridge on foot that it would require more courage for me to walk to the part of my town situated across the river than it would to face a nest of Boche machine guns. And yet day after day, month after month, and year after year I have carried in my soul the dread of such an eventuality.
I see a man hobbling past my house on crutches, a cripple for life, and I actually envy him. At times I would gladly exchange places with the humblest day laborer who walks unafraid across the public square or saunters tranquilly over the viaduct on his way home after the day's work."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
"Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim"
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Far From Home
Another life takes place; it is spread unevenly across the land. I experience the world move from place to place, with each movement in space anchored by the invisible boundaries binding me to a homeworld. I move through the world, crossing the terrain of different environments. At times, this anchor reaches a threshold, at which point the human body comports itself in the world differently. Suddenly, the body cease to belong to the world and instead experiences itself as a zero gravity plot of materiality with no discernable sense of orientation. To be far from home. What this does not mean is to be far from the nest, womb, or sanctuary. To be far from home one need not even travel beyond the home. The nocturnal murmuring of some homeward displacement begins in the very midst of an already established placement in the home. The home grips the body, and in return, the body opens itself up to the dense materiality structuring the walls, ceilings, and floorboards, all of which constitute the physical space termed “home.” The body is dizzy in the human home. A human subject must grip the walls of the home in order to move from one room to another. Another life takes place in the basement, still another in the dinning room. There is no reconciliation between these rooms; they are cast into an anonymous world with no relation between them. Frozen, the human body stands between a series of rooms, caught in a fractured limbo, and thus finding reprieve only in the ambiguous space that separates one room from another.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Announcing: The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny
I’m pleased to say that The Memory of Place is now available for pre-order for publication in January 2012 through Ohio University Press. The suitably desolate painting used as a cover image comes courtesy of Christopher Saunders. Expect further marketing posts in the months to follow. In the meantime, here's the book’s blurb and an endorsement from Edward Casey.
From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, The Memory of Place charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world. Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, The Memory of Place argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies.
Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls The Memory of Place “genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Embodying Neurosis
Looking for one thing or another, I stumbled across a note from mid 2008:
As it turned out, I had suffered some kind of toxic damage to my liver, probably due to something innocuous as aspirin. Symptomatically, this reaction took the shape of extreme lethargy, intense migraines, and what I described at the time as “my hand going unconscious.” For a while, I could not leave my flat without feeling vertigo. Very frequently, I would have to hold on to a physical object, such as a railing or umbrella, in order to walk. When teaching, I would have to hold fast to a chair and stare into the distance to maintain balance. Part of this dizziness was no doubt a response to a series of physical symptoms that were mediated by a latent anxiety condition. After all, many people experience tiredness simply as a physical depletion of energy rather than a threat to their self. In my case, the vulnerability that comes with being ill carries with a pronounced sense of the world as both contingent, other, and nauseating.
Before long, I regarded the outside world as an anathema to health. Incorporating that dizziness into my bodily schema, the incipient germs of an agoraphobic relation to the outside were born long after the physical illness had subsided. Despite being discharged from the medics, my bodily relation to the world as a nauseating and nauseous place remained in place. I was anxious, but the threat was a phantom of my habits, and thus solidified a way of being-in-the-world that no longer aligned with the physical structure of my body. When I was unable to leave the confines of my street in 2009—let alone be somewhere as alien as a supermarket—without experiencing an apocalyptic sense of dread, then my body was comporting itself to a world that only had a validity in 2008. The various agoraphobic attacks that took place during that time—all compelled by the primordial urge to flee—were attuned to a no longer existing world, the threat my body faced a spectre of another time.
Today, the temporality of my body has been reconciled with the spatiality of the world: my body, through a series of interventions, has moved on. Afforded this distance, I reflect on this memory not by way of some affirmation of the body’s marvellous ability to reinvent itself. No, what interests me is the genesis of bodily neurosis: how, in particular, the habits we adopt when physically ill can in turn become constitutive of a broader way of being. (I should say that what I’m describing here is a very specific anxiety, phobic in structure and bodily in expression. Although this anxiety is exposed to a multiplicity of readings—not least an existential one—at its core, the issue is a behavioural one of how human bodies comport themselves in the world.) The curious thing about bodily practices and neurosis is hence that they are valid only when in a specific context. When ill, the body prepares itself to experience the world in a particular way. Once that illness has passed, that mode of embodiment is no longer needed, and if it persists, then there is a sense in which it can be considered “neurotic.”
This usage of neurotic is inspired in part by John Russon’s treatment in his excellent Human Experience. For Russon, a neurosis is structured by a burden to some “compulsion of familiar narratives that function in one’s life as crippling, in articulate moods in which one finds oneself launched into patterns of behaviour that stand at odds with the patterns one would other choose” (85). It is a venerable description, as it highlights the experience of one’s neurosis as having an agency of their own—a point that is rendered viscerally clear in the experience of phobic people who regard themselves as “possessed.” If a neurosis has an agency of its own, then whom does it belong to? Ruling out some kind of spiritual intervention, the “other” for whom my neurosis belongs is at the same time me. Only, it is me as a memorial entity, statically frozen in time. Speaking of a woman with an eating disorder, Russon writes: “Her behaviour enacts a memory—or rather, it is the memory—of who she is, but it is out of step with the self she has become. Her memory is a remembering of originary events…but it remembers them as static inasmuch as these strategies are no longer living” (87).
Is neurosis primarily a dialogue with oneself, then? Clearly not: the reduction of neurosis to a habit that has outstayed its welcome does not account for the communicative role bodily neurosis play in shaping our relation with others. After all, being ill or being neurotic can in many ways be existentially purposeful to an individual. This folds back to my question regarding a hermeneutics of agoraphobia – and in particular how we can understand what our bodies are communicating if the “I” is somehow absent? Agoraphobia is a manner of being-in-the-world—it is an appraisal of the world—that stands apart from the aetiology that established the condition. Russon writes: “The very nature of neurotic compulsions is to enact communicative gestures the significance of which stands at odds with their manifest self-presentation” (116). Russon’s account of neurosis as an “insincere” mode of communication points toward an explanation of how compulsions can be both instinctual and alien simultaneously. In its indirect mode of communication, the neurotic response to the world expresses a bodily relation that is ontologically prior to verbal communication, and thus embodies a truth that is, in its initial appearance, necessarily indecipherable.
This is how it will end one day, so I tell myself in the car park of Tesco’s. This is how it will end: listening to Peter Gabriel’s “San Jancinto” on infinite repeat while waiting for an egg sandwich. I hold the line. How many times have I sat in this car park? The history of this place stretches all the way back to an ex-girlfriend's plum and red 2CV, the gearstick of which you would have to pull toward your chest and turn in one fluid motion. The car had no radio, but I would often journey with a portable music player which sat below the dashboard.
Minutes later, I’m in the basement of a private medical centre. The radiologist is applying a cool gel to my body and pressing an ultrasound device against my chest. In the corner of my right eye, I see images of my internal organs flash up on the screen. The world of flesh has a platform. But I’m afraid to look. And so I feel the presence of this screen force itself against me, my own body televised as an alien organism, inspected by a consultant expert. “Cellular death,” the radiologist says within two seconds. I involuntarily grip his wrist. “Toxic damage.” The radiologist is explaining this landscape of damage, outlining the counters and speckled aspects of my interior life. I think back. I am recalling my childhood in Florida. 1992, Sanibel Island. During that time, I was attacked by a stingray, the poison launching itself into me with the power of …
As it turned out, I had suffered some kind of toxic damage to my liver, probably due to something innocuous as aspirin. Symptomatically, this reaction took the shape of extreme lethargy, intense migraines, and what I described at the time as “my hand going unconscious.” For a while, I could not leave my flat without feeling vertigo. Very frequently, I would have to hold on to a physical object, such as a railing or umbrella, in order to walk. When teaching, I would have to hold fast to a chair and stare into the distance to maintain balance. Part of this dizziness was no doubt a response to a series of physical symptoms that were mediated by a latent anxiety condition. After all, many people experience tiredness simply as a physical depletion of energy rather than a threat to their self. In my case, the vulnerability that comes with being ill carries with a pronounced sense of the world as both contingent, other, and nauseating.
Before long, I regarded the outside world as an anathema to health. Incorporating that dizziness into my bodily schema, the incipient germs of an agoraphobic relation to the outside were born long after the physical illness had subsided. Despite being discharged from the medics, my bodily relation to the world as a nauseating and nauseous place remained in place. I was anxious, but the threat was a phantom of my habits, and thus solidified a way of being-in-the-world that no longer aligned with the physical structure of my body. When I was unable to leave the confines of my street in 2009—let alone be somewhere as alien as a supermarket—without experiencing an apocalyptic sense of dread, then my body was comporting itself to a world that only had a validity in 2008. The various agoraphobic attacks that took place during that time—all compelled by the primordial urge to flee—were attuned to a no longer existing world, the threat my body faced a spectre of another time.
Today, the temporality of my body has been reconciled with the spatiality of the world: my body, through a series of interventions, has moved on. Afforded this distance, I reflect on this memory not by way of some affirmation of the body’s marvellous ability to reinvent itself. No, what interests me is the genesis of bodily neurosis: how, in particular, the habits we adopt when physically ill can in turn become constitutive of a broader way of being. (I should say that what I’m describing here is a very specific anxiety, phobic in structure and bodily in expression. Although this anxiety is exposed to a multiplicity of readings—not least an existential one—at its core, the issue is a behavioural one of how human bodies comport themselves in the world.) The curious thing about bodily practices and neurosis is hence that they are valid only when in a specific context. When ill, the body prepares itself to experience the world in a particular way. Once that illness has passed, that mode of embodiment is no longer needed, and if it persists, then there is a sense in which it can be considered “neurotic.”
This usage of neurotic is inspired in part by John Russon’s treatment in his excellent Human Experience. For Russon, a neurosis is structured by a burden to some “compulsion of familiar narratives that function in one’s life as crippling, in articulate moods in which one finds oneself launched into patterns of behaviour that stand at odds with the patterns one would other choose” (85). It is a venerable description, as it highlights the experience of one’s neurosis as having an agency of their own—a point that is rendered viscerally clear in the experience of phobic people who regard themselves as “possessed.” If a neurosis has an agency of its own, then whom does it belong to? Ruling out some kind of spiritual intervention, the “other” for whom my neurosis belongs is at the same time me. Only, it is me as a memorial entity, statically frozen in time. Speaking of a woman with an eating disorder, Russon writes: “Her behaviour enacts a memory—or rather, it is the memory—of who she is, but it is out of step with the self she has become. Her memory is a remembering of originary events…but it remembers them as static inasmuch as these strategies are no longer living” (87).
Is neurosis primarily a dialogue with oneself, then? Clearly not: the reduction of neurosis to a habit that has outstayed its welcome does not account for the communicative role bodily neurosis play in shaping our relation with others. After all, being ill or being neurotic can in many ways be existentially purposeful to an individual. This folds back to my question regarding a hermeneutics of agoraphobia – and in particular how we can understand what our bodies are communicating if the “I” is somehow absent? Agoraphobia is a manner of being-in-the-world—it is an appraisal of the world—that stands apart from the aetiology that established the condition. Russon writes: “The very nature of neurotic compulsions is to enact communicative gestures the significance of which stands at odds with their manifest self-presentation” (116). Russon’s account of neurosis as an “insincere” mode of communication points toward an explanation of how compulsions can be both instinctual and alien simultaneously. In its indirect mode of communication, the neurotic response to the world expresses a bodily relation that is ontologically prior to verbal communication, and thus embodies a truth that is, in its initial appearance, necessarily indecipherable.
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