Part-Objects as Art-Objects: Psychoanalysis
The following is the second half of a dissertation I submitted for a Master of Arts degree.
It was awarded a distinction.
The Freudian Oedipal event or scenario is ostensibly about a radical splitting of a homogenous sense of subjectivity as the boy child realizes that he is different from his mother and that she is an object of desire, whilst the girl child seeks the desire of her father after realizing that she is like her mother. Many psychoanalytical interpretations of art involve discussion of Freudian ideas such as the unconscious and libidinal motivating drives. However this text more closely focuses on re-readings of Freud’s Oedipal scenario, and aspects that are specifically relevant to more digital or systematic approaches to cognition. As Julia Kristeva suggests this distinction is not unusual;
‘Many practitioners and theorists view psychoanalysis as a transaction of organs and drives, while others make of it a mathematical formula of the signifier or a theory of `mind’, or yet again a cognition' (Kristeva, 1998).
Post-Freudian psychoanalytical theorists such as Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva and Felix Guattari (writing with the philosopher Giles Deleuze) approach the Oedipal scenario differently. However, although their approaches cannot be argued to be radically distinct from each other – many points overlap and intersect – there is a sense in which they create independent cognitive realms within which notions of the ‘partial-object’ might function. I focus here on the mathematical formulas that these theorists propose rather than any emphasis on organs and drives.
What have been particularly useful to art historians are the visual processes through which the conceptual splitting of individual subjectivity has been argued to occur. Indeed, although they certainly do not describe their approach as formalist, art historians such as Briony Fer (1997, 1999 & 2004), Hal Foster(1996), Rosalind Krauss (2000) and Mignon Nixon (2002) have thought about various different psychoanalytic modes of visuality (as active or contingent visual modes) and asked how we might read, or relate to, the material and thus formal properties of art objects. For example, Fer (Ibid) has drawn on the various psychoanalytical languages of Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in her various readings of the formal properties of abstract art.
What interests me here are the ways in which art historians use psychoanalytical concepts as conceptual metaphors rather than as direct psychoanalytic affect. As one idea is understood in terms of another that is conceptually superimposed onto it from another conceptual domain, psychoanalytic ideas on dynamic relations inform relations between material part elements in art. What is important, is that by stating that psychoanalysis is being used as a conceptual metaphor is to expresses the point that relations between partial-objects in art are not proposed to be literally the same as the affect laden interactions discussed by psychoanalysts. Instead, a conceptual comparison is being made as one idea is understood in terms of another structural system. This is not to say that psychoanalytical tropes are never used literally, indeed they are. Freud’s essay ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ (1910) interprets art through an analysis of the artist and is a case in point. In addition, the direct affect of art and film on the emotions of the spectator has been argued by many, including Laura Mulvey (1989) for example, to be open to literal explanation in psychoanalytical terms. However, if we understand semiotics to be a methodological approach to the systems through which language functions, to look at the use of different systems of conceptual metaphor to interpret formal qualities in art, is , I want to suggest, synonymous with what Kristeva describes as ‘semanalysis’.
Julia Kristeva (1974) uses the term semanalysis to describe the juxtaposition of semiotics and psychoanalysis in making meaning for formal literary structures. Semanalysis seems an ideal term then, to describe the approach used for this dissertation. Indeed this text seeks to discern, and argue for the existence of, various semanalytic methods that are currently being used to read form in art. Thus I want to suggest that the method being used here is fundamentally semanalytic in nature.
As I’ve suggested, post-Freudian psychoanalytical theorists Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva and Felix Guattari and Giles Deleuze approach the Oedipal scenario differently. Although their ideas cannot be argued to be completely distinct from each other – many points overlap and intersect – they each create independent realms within which visual part-objects (such as breasts, penis, face) function in relationship to linguistic objects or signs.
Chapter 4: Semanalysis and contemporary art history
The psychoanalytic Oedipal scenario depicts the beginning of ordering and classifying things in the child’s environment. Freud’s ‘New Introductory Lectures’ (2001) articulate the importance of the Oedipal scenario in the development of subjectivity, and the ways in which it marks sexual differentiation. Freud looked at what motivated the child to move from no sense of individuality, to the comprehension of their separateness from others and their sexual individuation. Therefore the Oedipal scenario can be said to mark primary difference. The two headed, four armed and four legged creatures, quoted by Jacques Lacan in his ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’ (1994) seminar show the primary split; the creatures are split in two and consequently crave a return to union. Before the structuring of identities, the child’s world is ostensibly filled with an incoherent babble of sounds and sensations. Lacan (2006) begins his ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ by informing us that the way that we understand that a word is part of a language, is through our ability to distinguish it from what might otherwise appear to be a homologous babble of sounds:
‘What defines any element of a language (langue) as belonging to language, is that, for all the users of this language (langue), this element is distinguished as such in the ensemble supposedly constituted of homologous elements’ (Lacan, 2006).
For Lacan once the ‘homology’ is split and linguistic objects are formed an excess of partial-elements is produced. This excess might be described as the difference between a ‘subterranean’ realm of disordered ‘part-objects’ and an ordered realm of classified things or whole ‘objects’. Lacan (2006) reread Freud in the light of the linguist Ferdinand Saussure and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. In his 1953 paper ‘The Field and Function of Speech and Language’ (2006) Lacan argues that Freud’s Oedipal scenario has a distinct relationship to the ‘Elementary Structures of Kinship’ (1969) that were proposed by Levi-Strauss. Lacan argues that the family is a linguistic framework within which the subject must learn its place according to relationships and roles. In addition Lacan draws on the binary interdependence that Saussure found in linguistic structures when he argues that the signs ‘male’ and ‘female’ are not only oppositions, but also have hierarchical ‘positionings’, such as that of Phallus and lack-of-phallus that are dependent upon each other. For Lacan (1994), when we give something conceptual territory it is because we desire that it should be split from the excess, and formed into a similar significant position to that of the founding linguistic encounter; the symbolic ‘name-of-the-father’. The phrase ‘paternal metaphor’ is introduced by Lacan in 1957. Dylan Evans (1996) states:
‘It designates the metaphorical character of the Oedipus complex itself. It is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification is phallic’ (1996, p137).
What is important for the argument being made here is that on the one hand we have a realm of excess in which partial-objects overlap each other (rather than being clear and distinct) and on the other we have a realm in which the excess is split and linguistic objects become conceptually ordered.
In many ways looking at abstract art is similar to the experience of a very young child when they begin to order their environment. The child is compelled to organise visual objects and events not encountered before into a meaningful system and to do so they need to evaluate that which is prominent from that which is in excess of prominence. Likewise, in order to interpret, and be able to discuss, the various part-elements in abstract art we also need to organise a system of interpretation. The artist Helio Oiticica effectively reverses this idea as he suggests that when working with the materials of his art:
‘I feel like a child who begins to experiment with objects in order to understand their qualities (solidity, hollowness, roundness, weight and transparency). It is the starting point for perceiving the specific qualities of objects except that in this case, it is evidently a matter of stripping existing objects of their connotative qualities in order to leave them in their primitive purity’ (2007).
Oiticica reduces the ordered realm of connotation back to a series of sensorial material properties. Therefore, I want to look at the kinds of routes through which the viewer might bring that ‘primitive purity’ back into language. To write about the installation Grand Nucleus (1960-66) and to intellectually evaluate its material properties is to bring the work to language. Therefore to discuss psychoanalytic arguments regarding the construction of language allows discussion of a variety of potential processes.
On the one hand Lacan posits a hierarchical binary structure that involves the Phallus and lack-of-phallus identificatory positions, whilst on the other he articulates a deferral or slippage away from the ‘name-of-the-father’ into a realm of excess that he calls the ‘Imaginary’ realm of ‘objects petit autre’. According to Jessica Evans (1999) this leaves the female in a ‘lack-of-phallus’ position:
’For Lacanians femininity is doomed to be positioned as ‘lack’ except to the extent which it ‘escapes’ the phallus as jouissance. However, whereas Lacan viewed identity as inescapably caught up in the misrecognition and alienation of the imaginary and symbolic registers, French psychoanalytic feminism has posited pre-Oedipal experience as an alternative basis for femininity’ (Evans, 1999, p.32).
In the later part of the twentieth century French theorists Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, sought ways in which the female might be given a more dynamic role in the construction of language in psychoanalytic terms. Thus, according to Jacqueline Rose French feminism ‘refuses Lacan’s central claim that there is ‘no place prior to the law which is available and can be retrieved…no feminine outside of language’ (Rose, In. Du Gay et al, 2005, p.64). However Melanie Klein, a child psychoanalyst, had expressed her ideas regarding partial-objects and the pre-Oedipal realm earlier in the century. As I have suggested, the notion of an accessible realm of ‘partial-objects’ that is ostensibly pre-Oedipal suggests sensations and material things that do not have a complete linguistic term ascribed to them. They are not complete conceptual objects because they have not been radically ‘Othered’ or classified and ordered (and ‘Oedipalised’) into a linguistic system. This is a realm of partial-objects that Lacan terms the Imaginary. Klein is one of the founders of Object Relations theory in psychoanalysis. Like Freud and Lacan, Klein is also interested in the ways in which we come to comprehend objects as we relate to materials and events in our environment. However for Klein language begins before the radical splitting that occurs due to the perception of gendered difference. For Klein it is within the babble of sounds and sensations, or partial-objects, that sensory data is accorded specific qualities and becomes part of language. As we have seen, for Lacan, the ways in which linguistic objects are created is through the perception of difference (Phallus and lack) that exists in the biological world whereas, for Klein, it is through the sensation of difference (as gratification or frustration) that the child feels within its body according to whether it is hungry or satisfied. At times of gratification when the baby is feeding the child feels an internal sense of oneness with mother and her breast. However, at times of frustration, such as when the baby is hungry and is not receiving the breast, the child gets angry. In her biography of Klein, which is part of her ‘Female Genius’ trilogy, Kristeva quotes Klein:
‘I have often expressed my view that object-relations exist from the beginning of life, the first object being the mother’s breast which to the child becomes split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in the severance of love and hate’ (Klein In. Kristeva 2001, p.62).
Klein argues that conceptions of split objects such as the ‘frustrating breast’ can be made whole as it is psychically integrated with the ‘satisfying breast’. The split is then resolved through an internalized conception of both aspects of breast as one and the same object. According to Klein, the severance of love and hate, results in the polarized ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position whereas the integration of love and hate, results in the ‘mature depressive position’. The mature depressive position sees both a conceptual and an emotional management of the apparently ambivalent breast that may be a source of both pleasure and pain and is the aim of therapy. What is distinctive about Klein, feminist writers such as Kristeva have argued, is that meaning is ascribed to the partial-objects or sensations that the child feels within the body, rather than beginning at the visual comprehension of binary sexual difference.
Julia Kristeva, born in Bulgaria and fluent in Russian, a student of Roland Barthes, and who along with Tzvetan Todorov introduced the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin to Western intellectuals, was a member of the radical Parisian group Tel Quel and a practicing psychoanalyst. Therefore, she was well positioned to rearticulate the structural qualities she found in Freud’s Oedipal event. In her work ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ (1984) Kristeva proposes a ‘semiotic Chora’ as an opposing realm to Oedipal ‘symbolic law’. Toril Moi (1986) proposes that Kristeva 'brings the body complete with drives into semiotics’. According to Moi; ‘Kristeva transforms Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic order into a distinction between the semiotic and symbolic’ (Ibid, p.12). Thus Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ realm is a realm of partial-objects. Kristeva, in her early work ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, written in 1966, used the Russian theorist Bakhtin’s term ‘carnivalism’ to discuss ‘a space where texts meet, contradict and relativize each other’ (Kristeva 1966, In Moi, 1986, p.34).
‘The poetic word, poly valent and multi determined, adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified culture. Bakhtin was the first to study this logic, and he looked for its roots in carnival’ (Kristeva, In. Moi, 1986, p.36).
For Bakhtin (2006) recreational carnivals were rituals in which persons could transgress established identities by wearing costumes and masks. Therefore carnivals functioned in society as communal spaces in which people could transgress, and thus reconfigure, identity. Kristeva (1984) cites Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival space when she marks out a space within which meanings and identities can be allowed to ‘relativise’ each other before being remade, She calls this quality of space the ‘semiotic Chora’. She proposes that revolutions through the ‘poetic language’ of the 'semiotic realm' are made possible because there is a Choric realm that exists extrinsically to the ‘symbolic’ Oedipal realm. Kristeva marks out a third territory that exists in addition to the interdependent double ‘Phallus and lack of phallus’. For Lacan we only understand the sign ‘male’ when we have access to its counter component ‘female’ as that which fails to be male. Kristeva (1984) argues that whilst the biological female is certainly a linguistic Other, any notion of the lack-of-phallus position being an ostensibly feminine space needs to be reformulated. Thus, she separates the notion of feminine from the concept of a biologically determined female. Kristeva (1984, p.40) makes her argument as she proposes that Lacan’s reading of Freud implies a split between a singular absence (lack-of-phallus) and singular presence (Phallus). This Kristeva (1984, p.40) represents using the numerals 0–2. The ‘0’ she posits as the semiotic Chora and the ‘2’ as the doubled interdependent nature of the male/female or presence/absence binary (as the Phallus and its’ lack). Therefore she shifts the notion of femininity away from ‘lack’ into a third realm; the semiotic Chora.
However this realm is not radically split from the Oedipal double, but engages with it. What is linguistically Phallic or overtly present at a point in history may be made less so over time. Through reengagement with the pre-Oedipal realm, presence may move into absence as meanings change and evolve. Therefore Kristeva (1984) attempts to retrieve a place outside of Oedipalised symbolic law as she distinguishes between her semiotic and symbolic realms. She argues that drives or the ‘genotext’ as ‘energy charges’ and ‘psychical marks’ articulate a ‘Chora’ (1984, p.25). She describes the Chora as ‘a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated’. The Chora then, is a totality but one, unlike the Oedipalised symbolic, does not express. However Kristeva also states that; ‘deprived of unity, identity or deity, the chora is nevertheless subject to a regulating process which is different from that of symbolic law’ (1984, p.26). The Chora then, is not a ‘deity’ type of totality, because it is ‘subject’ to another process; a process that has a ‘regulating’ function. She sees no hierarchy between the idea of a pre-Oedipal (or ‘semiotic’ realm) and the Oedipal (‘symbolic’) but instead an ongoing dialogical communication between the two.
Kristeva doesn’t advocate an oppositional body-mind theoretical split. What she finds in Klein’s theory is that it negates the tendency of modern western thought to split the body from the production of the word. She states that it was Melanie Klein who; ‘revived flesh within the word, and she privileged the body of drives and passions within the imagery and symbolism that weave patients fantasies together’ (2001, p.148). Klein’s ‘phantasy’ realm for Kristeva is a space in which the body and symbols co-exist, and continue through adult life to be able to be modified by each other and restructured.
The pre-Oedipal articulated by Kristeva and Klein is a realm of heterogeneity within which language is constructed. It is a heterogeneity of partial-objects. However it is a realm that exists in a relationship to the Oedipal rather than being a replacement for it.
I now want to discuss a replacement; Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘anoedipal’. The anoedipal mode proposes quite unexpected modes of making linguistic connections. Although it differs from the heterogeneous realm of partial-objects found in the pre-Oedipal, it is, nonetheless, still heterogeneous rather than homogeneous or binary. Felix Guattari was a psychoanalyst who trained with Lacan and practised at La Borde clinic in France. Giles Deleuze was a philosopher. According to Guattari the unconscious (as the realm of partial objects) is not ‘structured like a language’ as Lacan had argued, nor is it a ‘figural’ choric realm as Kristeva suggests, but instead he and Deleuze find it to be ‘machinic’ (In. Guattari 2006, p.18).
Writing before his collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze (2004), in ‘Difference and Repetition’ published in France in 1968 shows his early interest in psychoanalysis when he opposes this restricting realm proposed for the partial-object. Deleuze (2004), citing both Melanie Klein and Lacan, proposes a distinctly different space in which partial-objects function. Indeed he renames the partial-object and use the term ‘virtual object’ as he evokes the notion of ‘pure difference’.
‘The virtual object is a partial object – not simply because it lacks a part which remains in the real, but in itself and for itself because it is cleaved or doubled into two virtual parts, one of which is always missing from the other’ (2004, p.125).
The virtual object then, functions in the same way as a partial-object but is not part of something ostensibly whole.
Deleuze and Guattari wrote two books subtitled ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ Anti-oedipus published in 1972 (2004a) and A Thousand Plateaus 1980 (2004b). In these works they negate what they saw to be the capitalist discourse inherent in the fixed familial relations of Freud’s Oedipal scenario and remain instilled in linguistic re-readings of his work. The fixed conception of nuclear families containing mother and father as founding signifiers in the developing conceptual landscape of the child, were radically aborted by Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, for Guattari; ‘without the Oedipal triangle, everything slips up and fucks of into desiring filliation’ (2006, p.36).
Both Klein and Kristeva propose that adults can fruitfully re-access the ostensibly pre-Oedipal realms of partial-objects and thus reconfigure Oedipalised notions. Both of their approaches can be seen as parts of a larger system within which the subject circulates through the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal. Whilst Klein’s ideas regarding making meaning with ‘partial-objects’ is well received by Deleuze and Guattari (2004a) they find the circular revolutions involved in Klein and Kristeva’s articulation of the pre-Oedipal problematic. In Anti-Oedipus (2004a) they argue that Klein may have been pressurised to fall in with Freud and that her integrative ‘depressive position’ could be said to be ‘a cover up for a more deeply rooted schizoid attitude’ (p, 46). In addition, in A Thousand Plateaus (2004b) with reference to Kristeva they state: ‘It is obvious that there is no system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic ‘chora’ theoretically prior to symbolisation’ (p.72).
Deleuze and Guattari contest the Oedipal structures and propose an ‘anoedipal’ manner of making meaning that is altogether different to the pre-Oedipal proposed by Klein and Kristeva. The ‘anoedipal’ is argued to be situated outside of the borders of closed familial relations altogether. It is argued to be ‘anoedipal’ principally because it does not involve the construction or transgression of previously defined figural or familial Oedipal borders (mummy, daddy, me). The anoedipal is a realm of partial-objects that does not ‘close up’. In ‘Anti-oedipus’ (2004a) Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘it would seem obvious that parents’ have an effect on the linguistic inscriptions that the child picks up. But, they ask us to consider; ‘what are the precise forces that cause the Oedipal triangulation to close up?’ (Ibid, p.51). They argue that Kristeva and Klein still adhere to the central tenets of Freud and the power of familial or genealogical relations to order language as they discuss a pre-Oedipal realm. Deleuze and Guattari state:
‘It is true that nothing is pre-oedipal….It is equally true that everything within the order of production is anoedipal , and that there are non-oedipal, anoedipal currents that begin as early as Oedipus and continue just as long with another rhythm’ (2004a, p.110).
Deleuze & Guattari in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ (2004a), argue that ‘the Oedipal operation consists in establishing a constellation of biunivocal relations’. Both Freud and Lacan posit the binary status of Mother and Father as founding signifiers that split the child’s feelings of symbiotic totality, and in so doing, cause a desire to re-find that same feeling of unity by reconnecting to an ostensibly ‘lost’ other half. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘bi-univocal’. Whilst for Kristeva and Klein meaning is made as symbols are figured and reconfigured via revolutions that can be made between a subjective interior realm, and conceptual objects that exist outside. However, Deleuze & Guattari argue that Kristeva and Klein make the assumption that partial-objects are parts of original whole objects and can thus be reintegrated:
‘Whatever the reality in which the virtual object is incorporated, it does not become integrated: it remains planted or stuck there’ (2004a, p.125).
As I have discussed, Klein argues that part-objects such as the ‘frustrating breast’ can be made whole as the individual integrates these paranoid-schizoid split objects via the depressive position and they become a phantasised whole mother. Deleuze (2004) replaces this with the concept of the ‘virtual’ or imaginary object, that is indeed a partial object, but one which no longer has a relationship to a whole:
‘In short, the virtual is never subject to the global character which affects real objects’ (Deleuze, 2004, p.125).
Heterogeneous partial-objects for Deleuze and Guattari do not have a secondary or provisional status, but a ‘becoming’ status because they provide entryways into the production of the objects from which we make our world. Partial objects are indeed split objects but they re in no sense split form some prior ‘real’ global object. There is a sense in which the object is shattered into parts and another realm and the parts no longer have a relationship to the former object but instead are born again completely anew without any global references.
This distance between Kristeva’s arguments for the pre-OedipaI and Deleuze and Guattari’s proposals for the anoedipal, I want to suggest, amount to different ways of conceptualising partial-objects and therefore, heterogeneity. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the introduction to ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (2004b) three systems of mapping the world; ‘root’, ‘radicle’ and ‘rhizomatic’ systems. With a ‘root’ system, one becomes two. The primary root splits and becomes two roots. According to Deleuze and Guattari when one becomes two ‘what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest and weariest kind of thought’ (2004b, p.5). They argue that ‘binary logic and biunivocal relations still dominate psychoanalysis’ (Ibid, p.6). Using the analogy of the development of a tree root, Deleuze and Guattari propose that one becomes two, and two become four as we develop as subjects situated within symbolic law. However, arriving at two from one, relies on a ‘strong principal unity’ and this is what Deleuze and Guattari refuse in linguistic psychoanalytic theses (2004b, p.6).
‘Even a discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection’ (2004b, p.5).
They propose an alternative to the binary ‘root system’, that they call a ‘radicle-system’ or ‘fascicular’ root. According to Chambers dictionary (2003) the word ‘fascicular’ can mean a ‘union of a number of parts side by side on a flat plate’, or a ‘bunched tuft of branches, roots, fibres etc’. Likewise, the ‘radicle’ system for Deleuze and Guattari, although a system in which a multiplicity is offered, an overall spiritual unity is still presupposed as an origin or an aim thus reflecting the notion of a ‘bunch’ or ‘plateful’ of parts or indeed a ‘superior unity’. Whilst they find much of value in Joyce and Nietzsche, they accuse Joyce of the inability to think beyond a ‘superior unity’, and Nietzsche for proposing ‘a cyclic unity of the eternal return’ (2004b, p.6): ‘most modern methods for making a series proliferate or a multiplicity grow are perfectly valid in one direction, for example a linear direction, whereas a unity of totalization asserts itself even more firmly in another, circular or cyclic dimension’
