Autoimmune Subjectivity - a concept in progress
Password: colon
“With the earlier examples of the human body [from Žižek]…the Real becomes the raw flesh of mortality, a corporeality at odds with a subjectivity in denial of its own mortality…” (Sheehan 26).
I created this video work using footage from a 2005 water mane inspection, interspersed with photos from my 2012 colonoscopy, which confirmed my Crohn’s disease diagnosis. In juxtaposing these images, I wanted to evoke the revulsion we feel when we experience the inner workings (or malfunctioning) of our internal bodies in a state of illness. As Slavoj Žižek writes, the demands of daily life require that we suspend the internal body’s functioning in order to relate to it within the symbolic order. In illness, we become aware of the rift between external, symbolic identifiers of self (personality traits, physical appearance, interests) and invisible, internal bodily processes, which we can neither name nor control. Once the body malfunctions, it becomes a sort of machinery, surveyed part by part to identify and repair the broken organ(s). We begin to experience the body as a revolting, diseased object requiring lifelong medical surveillance and intervention. Any prior illusion of bodily control and symbolic coherence in the world is shattered. In illness, we can no longer simply suspend internal bodily processes as usual—we are forced to confront the Real of the body’s mortality. Chronic autoimmune illness, in particular, disrupts the symbolic order both within us (prompting a split in subjectivity, a loss of some perceived former unity between self and body) and around us, rendering the world’s previously coherent scientific-medical discourses and political narratives untrustworthy.
Crohn’s disease is a category of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), an autoimmune gastrointestinal illness caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors, of which the most often cited in medical literature is a westernized diet and lifestyle. Frequent antibiotic and NSAID use, along with a diet low in fiber and high in saturated fat, processed foods, and animal products, are now recognized as risk factors for developing IBD and other autoimmune diseases. Such dietary and lifestyle patterns reduce the diversity of gut microbes, which regulate the immune system by breaking down fiber and producing short-chain fatty acids that protect the intestinal barrier. When gut microbiome diversity is compromised, fiber-digesting microbes begin to feed on intestinal mucus instead, causing intestinal permeability (pre-autoimmune “leaky gut”), and trigger the immune system to launch an auto-inflammatory response. In Crohn’s, this produces inflammation and ulceration along the gastrointestinal tract, causing symptoms such as abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, and weight loss (from nutrient malabsorption). Current treatments for IBD include pharmaceutical drugs, such as immunosuppressants, thiopurines (also used in high doses against cancer), and biologics, but surgical removal of inflamed or strictured sections of the gastrointestinal tract is also often necessary. Although particular diets, such as the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, have been proposed as complete treatments on their own, the risk of severe and life-threatening complications of Crohn’s (fistulas, bowel obstructions, colorectal cancer, etc.) leads most patients to opt for traditional pharmaceutical treatments and adopt targeted diets as secondary, preventive measures.
Illness forces us to assume a new role—that of a patient subject to endless medical surveillance. Advanced medical technology makes visible the formerly invisible dimensions of the internal body—in the case of IBD, MR imaging and ultrasounds, surgical intervention, and the dreaded colonoscopy/endoscopy procedure reveal the insides of the gut. Images of my gastrointestinal tract projected on screens and attached to procedure reports fragment me into machine-like parts that no longer resemble the whole, cohesive body that I thought was me. These medicalized images of disparate intestinal segments provoke discomfort, and I immediately feel alienated from my body, as though I were an outsider witnessing something I wasn’t meant to see. And in a way, I wasn’t meant to see my insides at all, because I never should have developed Crohn’s in the first place. Capitalist industrial modernity first engineered my illness, then developed technologies and pharmaceuticals to artificially prolong my life (and extend my years as a patient-consumer). Along the way, I was forced to adopt a new subjectivity: Autoimmune subjectivity. An autoimmune subject is created by environmental externalities of capitalism and becomes fully entangled within it, remaining dependent upon medical infrastructure and a constant stream of new medical-pharmaceutical innovations for survival. There is no opting out of medical surveillance and consumption, no escape from a diseased body designed for profit extraction.
In bouts of illness or amid symptom flares, the autoimmune subject becomes acutely aware of their own mortality. Moments of irrational, invisible pain and traumatic, invasive medical encounters preclude the possibility for the usual internal-body suspension Žižek describes. Every experience of a symptom pulls us out of our symbolic-level endeavors and reminds us of our body’s frequent suicide attempts (or, at least, what appears to be illogical self-destruction). The autoimmune body operates with a mystified cellular logic that defies the subject’s survival instinct—a sort of bodily death drive. Autoimmune disease is even a manifestation of death drive in a corporeal sense—the activated immune system attacks its own organs, launching an inflammatory response that destroys the body from inside-out. If left untreated, the autoimmune body quite literally self-destructs slowly, becomes an unusable lump of tissue and veins, and returns to inorganic matter. This bodily death drive places the autoimmune subject at odds with their own life instinct, at odds with the human need for a stable subjectivity within the symbolic order.
It’s no coincidence that autoimmune diseases of all kinds are on the rise in both affluent Global North countries and those beginning to adopt westernized diets and sedentary lifestyles—the animal agriculture, pesticide, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries fund scientific research, influence policy, and smear opponents for profit. As plenty of others before me have noted, these industries are in the business of prolonging our collective illness. In an environment brimming with carcinogenic agricultural runoff, endocrine disruptors in cosmetics, and “forever chemicals” in tap water and cookware, we have no choice but to suspend the miraculous inner functioning of our bodies, subject them to neglect, poisoning, and decay, and dredge forward as we pursue symbolic-level fulfillment.
Autoimmune disease is no accident, genetic anomaly, or individual misfortune—it is the body’s self-destructive impulse against the barrage of toxins, both literal and metaphorical, which make our contemporary world unlivable. Autoimmunity is not an individual genetic accident—it is a profitable externality of neoliberal capitalism. In our dystopian healthcare landscape, it’s profitable when illnesses cannot (yet) be cured, are caused “primarily” by genetics, and can “only” be treated with costly, long-term pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. It’s a public issue that we all have (or will develop) autoimmune diseases—the conditions of industrial modernity and corporate political control have turned us, unwillingly, into autoimmune subjects, yet we’re meant to believe that “bad genetics” caused our illness and pharmaceuticals are our only remedies. The chemical, agricultural, medical, and pharmaceutical industries (along with the government) are not only invested in creating an autoimmune population, they’re also actively forcing us to inhabit new forms of subjectivity, forcing us to move through the world in increasingly self-destructive, atomized, and demoralizing ways.
I have no political prognoses or solutions, only an intuition that health is increasingly inaccessible, and that autoimmune subjectivity will be a primary subject position of the coming decades. This video work is my effort to accept the Real of my body’s fragility and allow others to bypass, from a distance, the bodily suspension we perform within the symbolic, momentarily experience autoimmune subjectivity, and witness the extent of capitalist intrusion into our bodies.
Works Cited
Sheehan, Sean. Žižek: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum, 2012.
Skinny Puppy. “Dig It.” Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse, Nettwerk Productions, 1986. Spotify, https://
open.spotify.com/track/5XnOTaIZRMYV8UZzKwa5d5?si=77cdb5bfa7174068.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. Verso, 1994.
Voids: Berlin 1989-2019
I’d like to share a project of mine from the fall semester of my year in Berlin. The end product, as well as my memory of the process itself, epitomize my time in Berlin, one of expansion and exploration. The political, cultural, and historical significance of my surroundings drew something out of me that hadn’t been accessed in months. This project is the result of the vivid inspiration I felt emanating from the city and from myself as our paths crossed for the 30-year anniversary of an epochal event—the Mauerfall, November 9, 1989.
My video captures what I noticed when I walked through the city, what I paid attention to and cared to photograph—those voids and corners that somehow resembled the Berlin I had in my head: post-Mauerfall ‘90s Berlin.
Password: Voids8919
Artist Statement/Written Accompaniment to Video
Berlin’s days as a “poor but sexy” city have largely passed, but remnants of its distinctive post-Mauerfall aesthetic are still visible to those looking for it. Throughout my video piece, I attempt to capture this visual aesthetic, to the degree it still exists in Berlin, by juxtaposing my own footage with existing footage taken from German films of the post-1989 era in Berlin. I included snippets from Die Mauer (1990), Ostkreuz (1991), Berlin Babylon (2001), and, although it was made a few years before the Mauerfall, Der Himmel über Berlin (1987), a quintessential Westberlin film. To set up my own shots, I drew upon the visual style of Dietrich Oltmanns, Harald Hauswald, and Robert Conrad, all former East German photographers who shot black and white photos, most notably (for my purposes) of dilapidated architecture and vacant industrial spaces. These photographs served as inspiration for my own shots, which tend to be quite close-up, in order to focus on the textural quality of remaining old buildings in Berlin and to detach them from their now-gentrified contexts.
© Dietrich Oltmanns
© Dietrich Oltmanns
© Robert Conrad
© Harald Hauswald
Keeping this photographic style in mind, I also tried to mimic the types of recurring shots I noticed throughout the various films—there are static shots of buildings, and there are shots that pan horizontally in order to capture a landscape. Given the unfortunate scarcity of locations in the center of Berlin that offer entire landscapes devoid of both gentrification and blatant signs of 2019, I was confined to filming single buildings or quadrants that retain some unrecognizable quality (or, if recognizable, that are at least reminiscent of the era in question). While capturing my footage, I felt a certain nostalgia for a time so often invoked when people attempt to describe the essence of Berlin—that immediate post-Mauerfall moment in the ‘90s, when techno sprouted up as an instrument for organic reunification of the two Berlins, and when artists squatted for studio space in unclaimed, vacant buildings in the former East.
Ulrich Gutmair’s 2013 book, Die ersten Tage von Berlin: Der Sound der Wende, explores this new scene, which at the time brought desirability to former East Berlin, but which in hindsight has led to the widespread gentrification of former Eastern districts centered around art, such as Mitte, Scheunenviertel, and Prenzlauer Berg. He emphasizes the vastly different views of former East Berlin—that of its pre-Mauerfall inhabitants and that of incoming West German and international youth, who saw creative opportunity in its inexpensive, decaying spaces: “Die Leute aus dem Osten wollten die Mauer hinter sich lassen, Reisefreiheit ist eine ihrer zentralen Forderungen. Dass auch Leute zu ihnen kommen würden, wenn die Mauer weg ist, und zwar nicht nur zu Besuch, daran hatten sie nicht gedacht” [“The people from the East wanted to leave the Wall behind them, freedom of travel is one of their central claims. That people would also come to them when the Wall was gone, and not only to visit, they hadn’t thought of."] (Gutmair 94). This particular Berlin (and its accompanying aesthetic) was formed only by the circumstances put forth by the German division (in particular, the German Democratic Republic as a phenomenon), and before that, by the Europe-wide and also German-specific destruction brought by World War II and National Socialism, and even before that, by the massive currency inflation and general failures of the Weimar Republic in the interwar period. Perhaps we can understand the Mauerfall as more than a singular event, but rather, as the culmination of a nearly century-long chain of destabilizing events in Germany, signaling a new beginning, a “Wende,” as this period is often called.
Today, Berlin (or perhaps not all of Berlin, but certainly its development interests) often markets itself by invoking its ‘90s image—scrappy, free, artistic, and characteristically “poor but sexy,” although the city is no longer quite so poor, and arguably not quite so sexy, either. Berlin as a symbol, however, persists, despite the discrepancy between the Berlin that generated this symbol and the vastly different Berlin of today. Gutmair argues that despite development interests and the lack of open space to create, Berlin, as of 2013, had remained attractive to creatives: “Möglich war das, weil es Platz gab, passiert ist es, weil es genügend Leute gab, die Zeit, Kraft, und Ideen investiert haben. Kreative Leute gibt es immer noch genügend, die Stadt wächst … Die Jungen und Kreativen zieht es vor allem aus dem EU-Ausland nach Berlin” [“It was possible because there was space; it happened because there were enough people who had invested time, power, and ideas. There are still enough creative people—the city is growing … The youth and creatives move primarily from EU countries to Berlin.”] (Gutmair 248). Is this still true in 2019, or is Berlin aging and growing stale after its full-scale reinvention only thirty years ago? Changes to the city’s visual landscape, such as the closure and upcoming development of long-standing artist squat Tacheles, or the sterile, highly commercialized, and frankly, quite depressing Potsdamer Platz development, seem to mark the beginning of the end of Berlin as an affordable, edgy, fringe European city. In terms of mass-gentrification, Budapest, Kraków, or Zagreb may be next in line.
Perhaps this is part of today’s main threat to Berlin—it is so open to fetishization, so easily molded into what the eager, “artistic” international individual, perhaps the largest gentrifying force, envisions it to be. I am aware that my video may exhibit a fetishized, perhaps sickeningly nostalgic version of what I imagine Berlin in the ‘90s to have been like. I accept this as part of my learning process as a foreigner, especially as an American, in Berlin. My choice to use a song by Fischerspooner, an early-2000s New York City-based electroclash duo, as the backdrop for my video, is intended to provide a sense of structure for the images and to evoke the chugging, forward-moving feeling (but not the literal sound) that characterized Berlin techno in the ‘90s. The song, entitled “!@*$%#” (simply titled, “Fucker,” on the original release), comes from an album I grew up listening to, and it reminds me of a stripped-down, New York-ified snippet of the techno I have experienced while here. I felt it was important not to superimpose either a well-known or an obscure early Berlin techno anthem onto already literal images of ‘90s Berlin, as this would add yet another layer of a manufactured nostalgia I’m not in a position to fully contribute to.
Given that the first incarnation of Berlin’s techno scene was a direct result of the abundant industrial and dilapidated architecture in former East Berlin, including some reference to techno seemed appropriate. Unfortunately, this is another cultural sphere often invoked to declare Berlin’s impending “death.” The changing landscape of the city, characterized by widespread occupation and development of previously vacant industrial buildings, poses a certain threat to Berlin nightlife, at least for some who lived through its “high point.” In the exhibition book for No Photos on the Dance Floor! Berlin 1989-Today, recently at C/O Berlin, film director Romuald Karmakar foresees a bleak fate for Berlin techno: “The city’s empty spaces quite literally gave the music a physical space in which it could develop. As these spaces vanish, the significance of the music wanes” (Hoffmann 15). While this may be true, and Berlin techno may be slowly fading out, perhaps we could also interpret the city’s current electronic music scene as a direct link to the immediate post-Mauerfall era, and furthermore, as a sign that at least one of Berlin’s modern characteristic features is not yet lost. It seems that to a degree, Berlin techno as emblem of the city’s post-Mauerfall history preserves its identity and symbolic value, even today.
It was important for me to set the images to various beats in the music (another reason to use electronic music), in order to generate a certain pace throughout the video. To a certain extent, I placed like images together (based on composition, coloring, or movement), while also attempting to disperse my own footage somewhat evenly among the historic footage. When I began making the video, I had no specific image in mind that I thought fitting for the last shot. As I crafted the end of my video and had limited clips leftover, I searched through each of my selected films once more and found this close-up shot of what looks like a GDR-era Plattenbau structure being demolished. I thought it would be visually interesting and suggestive if reversed. For me, this shot at the very end conjures up the obvious questions of low-quality, homogenous commercial developments (and the tear-downs that make space for them), but also more nuanced questions of the city’s changing appearance. Is its character being torn down along with its older buildings, or has Berlin been rebuilt since 1989, albeit in a more intangible sense, into an entirely new city, distinct from each of its previous incarnations? Is Berlin’s spirit linked to its architecture? If so, Berlin must accept its imminent death. If not, can this intangible something innate to Berlin ever be killed?
Works Cited:
Berlin Babylon. Dir. Hubertus Siegert. Perf. Günter Behnisch, Helmut Jahn, und I.M. Pei. S.U.M.O Film, 2001. Film.
Der Himmel über Berlin. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander, and Solveig Dommartin. Janus Films, 1987. Film.
Die Mauer. Dir. Jürgen Böttcher. DEFA-Studio für Dokumentarfilme, 1990. Film.
Fischerspooner. “!@*$%#.” #1. Capitol, 2001. Digital file.
Gutmair, Ulrich. Die ersten Tage von Berlin: Der Sound der Wende. Berlin: Ullstein, 2013. Print.
Hoffmann, Heiko and Felix, eds. No Photos on the Dance Floor! Berlin 1989-Today. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2019. Print.
Ostkreuz. Dir. Michael Klier. Perf. Laura Tonke, Miroslaw Baka, and Suzanne von Borsody. Sputnik Film, 1991. Film.
In Transit: London, 1981 to Berlin, 2020
I can’t help but notice similarities between my parents’ photos from their academic year abroad in London from 1980-81 and those I took during my own (shortened) year in Berlin from 2019-20.
While in Berlin, the spaces and architecture that felt most aesthetically rich to me were derelict or decaying buildings and corners of subway stations that, apart from crisp, new signage or the occasional ceiling video camera, somehow recall the mid-20th century.
A noticeably postmodern stylistic quality belongs even to such mundane spaces as subways— whether this particular London Tube station or the Heinrich-Heine-Straße U-Bahn station were constructed in the ‘60s or the ‘80s, I don’t know. It almost doesn't matter. Something about that beige subway tiling, the curved surfaces, and the lurid quality of those fluorescent rectangular lights reveal aesthetic features simultaneously bland and specific enough to evoke an era.
It is this nondescript, indefinable form of the retro shining through Berlin’s corners and cracks that inspired me, every now and then, to imagine myself into the past.
Enough imagination, a bit of Simple Minds, and I could be there in an instant.
London Tube | 1981
Berlin U-Bahn Heinrich-Heine-Straße | 2020
Simple Minds | “New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84)” | New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) | 1982
Smashed glass on the street. Blends of nondescript artifacts, soiled or iridescent. An element of Duchampian chance, externally-imposed control.
If I’d had several more weeks or months to observe Berlin, my next undertaking would have been to photograph the mixed piles of miscellaneous junk found around the city. The junk is not foul and cockroach-ridden like New York trash heaps, nor is the junk comprised of discarded plastic squashed into matted brown grass along a suburban American highway. The Berlin junk is original, complex, inspiring, and it speaks to the nature of the city. It begs you to wonder how it got there and where it came from.
I came across this particular junk pile on Weichselstraße, somewhere between Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Its mixture of assorted glass shards, scrunched up cloth, cigarette butts, leaves and sticks, and white paint splatters, all covering a thick foundation of street filth, struck me as the perfect chance assemblage. It looked straight out of Eraserhead. Did someone come along and smash a window on top of the pile? Was the glass smashed already, then placed in a bag, where it ripped through the bag and fell out onto the already existing junk pile? Who left it there and why? I remembered the junk pile I encountered outside of the Groove office building on my first day as an intern—that one contained mainly dirt, a few shattered beer bottles, and soiled clothing. It gradually decomposed as its contents were picked up or washed away by the rain.
What happened to this pile? Did someone clean it up, having decided glass shouldn’t be left on the street for children and dogs to step on? Was it left alone to gradually merge with the streetscape? Did passersby like me take small pleasure in noticing it, in assessing its contents?
Something about these piles feels reminiscent of immediate post-Mauerfall Berlin—its dilapidated buildings with peeling facades and crumbling brick, left to be squatted and salvaged or to decompose like these piles. It’s as though now, amid the city’s thirty-year-long expansion and sterilization, its junk piles have shrunk down to these avoidable, yet persistent reminders of what once was, by chance, Berlin.
And now the city speaks: the piles were never junk, at all.
