I thought this was just my friend’s dark humour. I could say, the other day I found my alcoholic, disabled and European neighbour stealing money from the elderly Parkinson’s suffering man up the road. It was excruciating, decrepit and embarrassing for us all, like a nasty Louis Ferdinand Celine story. We all knew that a line had been crossed, now we can’t look each other in the eye, things shifted as the neighbour could be evicted if it was reported; don’t worry, that’s not going to happen, we have instead re-drawn some lines… This morning I texted my borderline personality disorder and witty friend about it, who said you should should ship him off to Rwanda for processing. I THOUGHT HE WAS JOKING!
…
…So Freud made some headway into jokes in his text, ‘Jokes (Witz) and their Relation to the Unconscious’ (1905). Freud considered successful jokes to rely on what he calls, the ‘economy of psychic expenditure’, to gratify some sort of prohibited tendency. He began a taxonomy of jokes, including these two below, that our artist, Owen Land refers to in his film, On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed? (1977-1979)
There are four of five marriage broker jokes in Freud’s study, they share a technique of splitting the attributes, the imperfections of the bride into separate, disconnected statements, with an unmasking of the broker’s self-betrayal through both flawed thinking and enthusiasm. Freud gets stuck here, saying he has lead himself into the dark, but won’t give up in his thirst for knowledge.
Johnson’s dark joke-made-real of his terms ‘Processing in Rwanda’ through ‘humanitarian partnership’ is Grand Guignol humour in the extreme, but here the horror entertainment becomes actual horror. It relies on our xenophobic association of contemporary Rwanda with its historic, 1994, bloody genocide and the association of the word ‘processing’ with forcemeat. The history of Rwanda and UK’s own humanitarian darkness sets up a perfectly farcical ‘humanitarian partnership’. If he wanted to create an image of offshore concentration camps and stomach churning gore he couldn’t have found a more efficient vehicle! The Dead Kennedys or CRASS played this game as sardonic irony in the 1980s, as I thought my friend was doing, but not so with the UK government, the irony has melted through the symbolic subconscious association to become an imaginary-meets-real event in the Rift Valley.
So this leads on to this post’s Owen Land Jokes as some light relief:
and
Two slightly different approaches on a military theme, separated by an art joke:
19. Even with one eye, Titian would be a titan (Owen corrects the manuscript with an ‘a’ inserted before titan.)
So here, if this is a script, there is a hope that the fetishisation of military attire and the secrecy of violence can be pulled apart by the unwavering strength of the artist!!!
Next time, Lacan on Freud’s witz, as I’ve ordered his Seminar V from Blackwells bookstore, to arrive any day now….! and his film ‘Thank Jesus for the eternal present’, as yet not much written anywhere, so looking forward!
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