Re: <documenta X><blast> inter-psychic artspace meets public disaster
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Sun, 6 Jul 1997 03:25:26 +0200
Greg
For Lacan, subjectivization is characterized by cuts from bodily events
(Real) by means of the signifier (Symbolic), in order to leave the inhuman
and the Real behind and enter the specifically human. These incisions
create some psychic wild residues: the objet (petit) a. In the course of
these cuts, the subject itself emerges: when language dims the archaic
modes of experience and when discourse, which conducts and presents the
laws and orders of language and society, nests in their place and
restructures the archaic processes and traumas as no longer accessible.
Even though unabsorbed by the Symbolic and imageless, the objet a is sliced
in consonance with the display of significance determined by the signifier
and is therefore still a phallic inscription of "bodily samplings", of
residues of trauma behind the screen of phantasy - residues from the
psychic space of the Real that spreads, according to Lacan, between trauma
and phantasy. The gaze is such a trace in the psychic unconscious space of
vision, concealed - and revealed - through the phantasy's screen. It
indexes that something enjoyable or painful has happened (jouissance, which
doesn't signify joy necessarily, but an arousal of either pain or joy in a
traumatic contact in the domain of the Real. Thus, the gaze is already a
"garbage" of what was much closest to us, of trauma in the the corpo-real.
That's why I suggest to understand the gaze as a phantasmatic trace of a
traumatic trace. From the angle of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, this
residue remains forever a hole, a "cause of the desire" according to
Lacan, that never satisfies desire. From the angle of the Real, the gaze
wakes up and perishes in accordance with trails molded by libidinal energy
channeled via partial drives; therefore the gaze indexes what Lacan calls:
"surplus-of-enjoying/paining" (plus-de-jouir).
The trauma for Lacan is strictly individual and unaccessible to the subject
via symbolic mechanisms, in accordance with the phallic structure of the
psychic Unconscious. That's wher art comes into the picture, which allows
us to conceive of a space beyond the phallus. In the passage to what I call
the matrixial gaze, you can sometimes, in a momentary revelation, register
your own part in the trauma and the phantasy of the other, and also
participat in its transmission and change. But then - then - you cannot
chose the moment to terminate the covenant with the other whose trauma you
partially share, transformed and by bribes, and you caannot chose to what
extent it will capture you, and how, since the phallus can't master the
matrix (but it can leave room to its coming into being).
I would love to understand better the link you make between this psychic
space and the emerAgency's approach to problem-solving and to mappingthe
triangulation--consultant, historical disaster, local community.
Bracha