Re: <documenta X><blast> Visual
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Sun, 27 Jul 1997 22:16:10 +0200
Jordan, you say:
>I can understand when you say that what is 'invisible' (behind the
>screen?) is, in >fact, visible -it's just not seen by the subject. The
>subject is ignorant of what is 'beyond appearance,' and it can only get in
>the way of a gaze that
>'envelops us and turns us into seen-beings, without showing itself to us.'
- Well, and here is the difficulty, from that kind of invisible which is in
principle visible we have further moved, with Lacan's gaze and Lyotard's
matrix-figure, to another kind of invisibility:
The figure-matrice, says Lyotard, is the "invisible in principle, object of
originary repression"; an entity which, in itself unintelligible, yet
scatters evidence of its own absence all over the figural space. Its
existence is derived from what is born out of it, from its hallucinated
child: the phantasy image-figure which does emerge to the surface. "if the
matrix is invisible [...] it is because it resides in a space which is
still beyond the intelligible". It "could never be an object of vision or
signification", it is the "invisible". (Discours/Figure, 339, 283). The
locus of the matrix-figure is a non-place in the sense that it is outside
the subject's hold - in what is either a Thing or an Other. It is branched
from the sensory-bodily level and split off from the level of specular
images and forclosed from language.
>and so is this act of situating the gaze in 'things' our own? .....>And
>how does the viewer 'lay down the gaze'?
- We do not situte the gaze in the thing, we do not project it in order to
find it back round us. The gaze doesn't belong to the subject; it
disappears when the subject emerges. Situating the gaze in Things is prior
to our will or has nothing to do with it, and if we paraphraze M. Ponty,
the gaze is prior to the devision into object and subject. In an empty
space opened up by desire, this non-place is the locus of donation on which
the unexpected event - the work of art - can be born. The term 'non-place'
refers to forclosure from either conscoous or unconscious subjective hold,
and the term 'donation', used by Lyotard, indicates some kind of passivity
or sacrifice, it is that laying down of gaze, whereupon relations are
fromed between art as the given-to-be-seen and artist as a seen-being and
not as the owner of the gaze.
>But then what does it mean that >the gaze belongs to 'things'?
- When Lyotard says that the figure-matrice is the object of originary
repression he refers to Freud's 'Urverdrangung'. Otherwise formulated in
psychoanalysis, the object of originary repressin is the Thing. Art
touches us in an unconscious dimension which is beyond appearance if beyond
appearance we can conceive of a gaze as traces of the archaic mental object
in its alliance with unconscious desire that treasures the early relations
of the Other toward me - when it is me who is being related to - on the one
hand, and in its links to the Thing on the other hand. The spatiality of
the matrix-figure, like that of the gaze, differs from what is offered by
perception since it is determined by libido-invested primary processes; its
routes are opened up by unconscious desire linked to the separation from
originary things and archaic part-objects.
Via art, an originary repression, a Urverdrangung re-approaches psychic
reality and struggles to emerge to the surface in the figure of a gaze. It
is the emergence of the gaze to the surface, which causes that vague
anxiety of the 'uncanny' - that oppressing feeling of distortion inciting
unease, that strangeness, that veiled chaperon of the return of the
repressed. Instances of the 'uncanny' arise, says Freud, when "something
which ought to have remained hidden has come to light"..."when the
distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something
that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality,
or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes."
(The 'Uncanny) A psychoanalytical Thing, then, is not an object, it is even
more archaic then a part-object.
Lacan's phallic 'gaze' like, Lyotard's 'matrix-figure', like Fedida's
'objeu', like "my" matrixial gaze occupy the same psychic space in the
sense that they are all not-yet or not-any-more objects, but are between
things and objects. Leaning on Straus and merleau-Ponty, Fedida elaborates
this distinction in relation to the child's game of fort/da in
sensory-motor terms, to which we have to add libidinal and relational
archaic streams: The object, says Fedida, corresponds to a functional and
symbolic organization of the "exterior world" which, as such, rests upon
the institution of conceptual units which are both perceptual and motor.
"These units are objectively defined by consciously attributable limits and
by their diachronic separation. The thing is distinguished from the object
in that it participates in elementary communication between feeling and
being moved (Erwin Strauss, Vom Sinn der Sinne): the thing is an
ante-predicative and pre-conceptual aesthetic reality. The horizon of
potentialities, or marginality (cf. Husserl, Maldiney) under which the
thing is discovered as Umwelt, or the core of the world one can call
reality (cf. Merleau-Ponty)." The aesthetic experience, says Fedida,
largely confirms this determinant signification of the thing - to which he
adds, after Heidegger, that it gathers and "brings together". (Fedida,
L'absence). If we move from a mental thing so defined towards the psychic
archaic Thing that hides behind originary repression, and from mental
objects so defined towards the archaic part-objects, the passage between
things and objects indicates a primary minimal measure of human aesthetics
difference. This primary measure before oedipal repression pointes to
different "holes" in the Real that can be embodied as a gaze in the
artwork.
Now, from a phallic angle, the Other and the Thing that carries the
vanishing gaze are articulated by Lacan as "Woman", where woman is an
archaic point of support for the mental object defined as an outside-within
(extimate objet a). I have suggested that from a matrixial angle the
Woman-Other-Thing is also a borderspace of support for the subject. This
suggestion change the position of the gaze. Here we arrive at the
impossibility, in the matrixil statum of subjectivity, of a net separation
bwetween object and subject, at a "feminine"-matrixial im-purity.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger