E:MU
SERIES: ANATOMY OF AN EMOTIONAL ASSAULT, 2015
The debate between biologically oriented scientists who view aggression as innate and those who emphasize the role of learning and experience in the development of aggressive tendencies remains unresolved. The discussion revolves around the question of exogenous versus endogenous causation of aggression.
The Innate Drive
Researchers such as Freud, Storr, and Lorenz attribute an innate drive to humans that compels them to attack and destroy others. They believe this drive must discharge itself either in direct aggression, by observing acts of violence (films, photographs, destroying inanimate objects, or striving for positions of power). If aggression is not lived out in this manner, uncontrolled outbreaks of violence and even suicide can occur. Critics of these theories reject the concept of an organismically determined aggressive drive. Humans can live peacefully for long periods if environmental conditions do not provoke aggressive behavior, though there are no uniform triggering mechanisms here.
Know Thyself!
A warrior samurai, so an ancient Japanese legend goes, once challenged a Zen priest to explain heaven and hell to him. But the priest answered contemptuously: ‘You are nothing but an uncouth lout, I shall not waste my time with the likes of you!’ Struck in his honor, the samurai went mad with rage, drew his sword from its sheath, and shouted: ‘For your insolence you shall die!’ ‘That’, the priest replied calmly, ‘is hell.’ Astonished by the truth of what the priest had stated regarding the fury that had seized him, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and thanked the priest with a bow for the insight. ‘And that’, said the priest, ‘is heaven.’ The samurai’s sudden awareness of his own heightened emotional state marks the crucial difference between being captive to one’s emotion and recognizing that one is being swept away by it. Socrates’ admonition ‘Know thyself’ addresses this cornerstone of emotional intelligence: becoming conscious of one’s own feelings in the very moment they arise.
“Between instinct and reason – the threshold where affect seizes control.”
© 2015 Edin Mustafic – Anatomy of an Emotional Assault
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Title: Anatomy of an Emotional Ambush | Year: 2015 | Series: 20 individual photographs | Print: 30×30 cm | Frame: 32×32 cm, thickness: 30 mm | Ink: Epson Ultra Chrome K3 Pigment Ink | Paper: Hahnemühle Fine Art Ultrasmooth, 305 g/m² | Framing: Museum framing white, gallery board, museum passe-partout white (3 mm), museum backing board, acid-free | Glass: Clarity 92% / museum glass | Edition: 1 (+1 AP)
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Studio note, 2015:
Emotions usually demand color – warmth, blushing shame, or fury. Precisely for that reason, I forced the body against a black background into a harsh, uncompromising black and white. Stripping away color deprives the affect of any comfort. What remains is not a melodramatic spectacle, but radical tension between light and shadow: emotion as an anatomical eruption, dissected down to the bone.
Emotions usually demand color – warmth, blushing shame, or fury. Precisely for that reason, I forced the body against a black background into a harsh, uncompromising black and white. Stripping away color deprives the affect of any comfort. What remains is not a melodramatic spectacle, but radical tension between light and shadow: emotion as an anatomical eruption, dissected down to the bone.