<documenta X><blast> inter-psychic artspace
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Fri, 4 Jul 1997 16:22:39 +0200
Sexuality is the domain in psychoanalysis where the space of art may be
articulated (Olessia, Viktor) since we enter both drive, jouissance and art
via the same "hole", the space of almost-faded psychic traces, hidden from
consciouness and linked to originary repression ( Urverdrangung). In this
hidden space, affect is exchanged beyond/without meaning, in this cavity,
art accumulates potentiality to shake frontiers of sense into becoming
thresholds for knowledge and to infuse changes in culture.
Art, says Lacan, is related to jouissance (primal joy or pain on the level
of the bodily Real) through the "anatomy" of such a cavity (vacuole). An
inaccessible trace of a lacking part-object - which he names objet a -
"tickles the Thing (das Ding) from within" and that's "the essential
quality of everything we call art." Moving from the individual to a
matrixial joint or shared borderspace, this cavity is not only both inside
and outside, it is also with-in, it arises only in/via intersubjective
jointness in an inter-psychic space.
An artwork attracts, shifts or originates a desire for an object that, once
created, mysteriously embodies a space in that cavity, join this almost
loss psychic holespace. A desire, still saturated with drive awakes where
an artobject joins forces as beauty and horror with an extimated (an
outside captured within) objet a, by-passing repression and regression at
the price of approaching dangerously the Thing, primary source of
Unheimliche - of uncanny anxiety related to an aesthetic experience
according to Freud - appealing the viewer to follow it into mysterious,
invisible space beyond yet inside the visible, to abandon defenses and
weave into the work its own invisible affect, phantasy, engagement,
knowledge. (On the question of affect, Ricardo, I will further elaborte
separately). The almost-impossible encounter between drive and the
aesthetic object in the in-outer - shared between artist and viewer -
screen of Vision is analogous, up to a point, to the almost-impossible
meeting between drive and the mental object in the out-inner screen of
phantasy. For Lacan, and in general in any on/off conveptualization of
pulsion, that of Lyotard, or of Krauss, there is total inaccessibility when
we are in the realm of absence (off). That's why Lacan talks about the
object as lacking (manque), and, he says, the unconscious leans on the
subject's cleft from its impulses. (Jordan, on the rythme of pulsation
etc., that you brought up using Krauss' interpretation of Lyotard I will
write a separate post).
Whereas Lacan emphasizes the relevance of the loss of part objects (in the
figure of the objet a) to art, Deleuze and Guattari insist on their
ever-renewed presence and their productability, naming them: desiring
machines. With the concept of desiring machines we are still bound to the
bodily organs of the Real, but the scope of the part- object's producing
and desiring capacity opens up to embrace animalistic, industrial,
sociological, ecological and historical organs.
In the scopic sphere of vision, the objet a is the gaze. For Lcan,
Loyotard, Krauss in the on/off scansion and beat, it can be either lacking
and split from the passions of the eye and dwelling in the Othe, or in
fusion. For me, moving from phallic to a matrixial perspective, we move
from an individual repressed "hole" to several holes, now standing for
diffraction of the eye-and-gaze between several - not infinite, not one -
entities, sharing the eye-and-gaze by several individuals, composing the
eye-and-gaze by several components, and dispersal and divergence of
'grains' of subjectivity between several different individuals, where some
eye-and-gaze(s) become borderlinks between partial subjects, along which a
diffracted gaze is plaited with-in the multiple-several holes with their
floating eyes without fusion nor split. I evoke this model in relation to a
female swerve and rapport (by "swerve" I refer to Merlau-Pontis "ecart":
differentiating a primary undifferentiated entity as a dehisence from
"within") since archaic metramorphic trans-subjective affective
transmission occurs with-in the becoming subject whose psyche co-emerges in
prebirth incest with-in the mother-to-be's affective, traumatic and
phantasmatic spheres, and she, and their archaic almost-loss rapprt, will
become in the future a part of the subject's originary repression.
This borderspace pentrates art both in its making and in its viewing, in as
much as we are touched by it.
Bracha