This writing explores beauty, as in a beautiful work of art such as a painting, theatrical drama, and a vase. The objective is to define beauty and establish its location, as in why beauty is not intrinsic to the work but rather extrinsically attributed by the social context of the viewer. In addition, why is beauty not related to the content (‘what’) but rather to the form (‘how’) of artistic representation. And lastly, since the ethical contemplation of aesthetics goes back to ancient Greek philosophy, we will explore the ethical function of the beautiful.
Terry Eagleton, contemporary literary theorist and current Distinguished Professor of Literature and creative writing at Lancaster University, argues that ‘most ethical theories can be assigned to one of Jacques Lacan’s three psychoanalytical categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, or to some combination of the three.’ For our exploration, we will be guided not only by these three registers, but by the scientific foundation of psychoanalysis, namely linguistics.
Without language, exploration is next to impossible. Section one is titled Signifier and explores the relationship between beauty and words, since, after all, beauty is a word that communicates something to someone. This section foregrounds beauty as something that exists in language and not in the real object itself. Moreover, we will see how beauty can mean different things to different speakers.
Section two focuses on the one that speaks, namely, the subject – the viewer who is subject to language for meaningful interpretation of beauty. We will look at the psychical dynamic of the human subject and how desire shapes interpretation imaginarily and symbolically.
The third section, titled, The function of the beautiful, references Lacan’s seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. It explores the ethical difference between what is good and what is beautiful and its relation to content and form.
The last section puts into practice what we learn from this exploration. We do a brief analysis of the ethical function of beauty in an ancient Red Figure vase produced by the Athenian artist Kleophrades.
For the sake of a short introduction to this brief contemporary exploration on beauty, we begin here with the ancient feud between philosophers and aestheticians and a fable from antiquity about an art competition.
The art competition
The Greek philosopher Plato outright rejected artistic representation of beauty as inferior imitation of truth. He attempted to evict the dramatis persona from Greek theatre saying acting is deceitful and dangerous to the public – he privileged narration because the storyteller never pretends to be someone else.
Aristotle, on the other hand, rejected Plato’s claims. For him, beauty lies in the form of artistic representation, such as in theatrical mimeses. Through formal imitation, he argued, the audience can be brought to catharsis and contemplate the good and tragic of life.
A famous parable dating back to antiquity demonstrates the issue. Two ancient Greek painters, Parrhasius and Zeuxis staged an art competition to see whose artistic representation is closest to reality. It was at first thought Zeuxis won because his painting of a boy holding grapes seemed so real that birds tried to peck the grapes. However, it was thought he must have painted the figure with less skill since otherwise the birds would have been scared off by the boy. Parrhasius, whose painting was seemingly veiled behind a curtain, won the competition because he deceived not birds but Zeuxis. When Zeuxis tried to pull the veil aside to see his competitor’s artifice, Zeuxis realised Parrhasius’ veil is the actual artwork.
What we can learn from this parable is that Zeuxis’s artwork had no ethical function, its only objective was deception of truth. Parrhasius, on the other hand, revealed not deception of reality, but beauty as illusion of appearance. It is in this formal aspect of representation that beauty, as artifice, takes on an ethical dimension. Beauty does not fake the contents of truth, instead, beauty is the artifice of formal representation.
The signifier
Say the word "lion," [Hegel] writes, and you create the lion ex nihilo, by abolishing it as a tangible thing. Say the word "dog," Kojeve comments, and you kill the real dog that barks and wags its tail. Pronounce the word "cat," Blanchot continues, and "death speaks." Say the word "elephants," Lacan concludes, and here comes a herd of elephants, present in its absence and filling up the room. What is left at the end of this interesting hecatomb? Nothing but words, words, words—that is, a subject. (Borch-Jacobson 1991:193)
Say the word “vase,” and you shatter the potter’s work beyond a ball of dust. On the word “vase,” you cannot tap your finger to hear the high-pitch tinkle of vitrified porcelain or put your hand inside the void around which the potter shaped the clay walls.
All you have when you say “vase” is the sequence of alphabet marks and sounds -v-a-s-e, drawn unconsciously from a repository of preestablished linguistic signifiers. You have an empty word, a signifier, forever severed from the real, tangible thing. The word “vase” and the real object-like-thing are not identical to each other – they are almost like arbitrary strangers to one another, meeting on occasion by linguistic convention.
The signifier can enter the meaningful world of symbolic order only when deployed in relation to other signifiers. In other words, the vase enters the imaginary realm when deployed in context to another imaginary vase. The symbolic vase can signify only by what it is not, by its difference to other vases. This is the condition of language, Eagleton reminds us, ‘signifiers themselves are inherently lacking: since meaning is a product of difference, it takes at least two signifiers to produce one [meaning].’
The duplicity of the singular, floating vase is like Noah’s ark, sailing a flood of meanings, without clinging to only one signified. For example, show the same vase to a designer and she qualifies it with an arrangement of other objects in a decorated interior; to the dealer, and he calculates a pocket of money; to the collector, and he turns it bottoms up to distinguish a potter’s name on the foot; to the utilitarian, and she asks if it is waterproof. Moreover, Lacan warns, when the signified slips indefinitely against the signifier, when none manages to furnish the ‘last word’ of meaning, we enter the realm of psychosis.
For the vase to signify, it must be articulated within the context of conventional form – it must be indexed within the discourse of the vase. Such discursive forms are diverse and interchangeable. For example, the medieval index of European traditional pottery transitioned from ceramic production in the ancient Levant. In turn, the discourse of traditional practice was supplanted by modern form during the industrial revolution. Moreover, the identity of the medieval peasant potter is scored through in favour of the studio potter Bernard Leach. In turn, the Leach metaphor is interchangeable to that of the designer, Josiah Wedgwood.
Ceramic design and recreational ceramics are today two popular, distinct forms of ceramic practice. Both these are cultural signifiers, proteges of industrialisation, and metonyms for desire. On the side of recreation, the Duchampian subject who practices a Foucauldian care of self, for the self. On the side of design, a commodity object that reflects the desire of the consumer. Either way, it is the discursive subject that ultimately mediates symbolic meaning.
The subject is the one who speaks, the one who seeks a reflective image in the vase and speaks the language of the vase to another. Through the mediation of the desiring subject, the vase transitions, metaphorically, from ‘empty’ to ‘full’ of meaning.
The subject
For the vase to signify, to convert from signifier to symbolic form, it must be articulated by the discursive viewer. For the flesh of clay to be inscribed with the word, the vase must be interpreted by the subject. And as Lacan reminds us, interpretation is driven by desire.
For significant interpretation, the vase must first survive the image of the narcissist. In other words, it must be kept at a safe distance from ‘the wandering shadow of his ego,’ as Lacan puts it when referring to the primal desire to find an imaginary reflection of self in the objects around us.
The imaginary is a kind of ideology, Eagleton explains, it means ‘pertaining to an image.’ For example, the bogus self-identity of an ideological subject, such as the Bolshevik revolutionary or the St Patrick’s Day parade marcher is not experienced as fake. Instead, Eagleton clarifies, the imaginary self-image feels miraculously natural – as if one is ‘leashed to it by an internal bond.’
The imaginary image as true reflection of natural identity is, Lacan argues, a misrecognition that persists in our psychic from birth when the infant is traumatically severed from the womb with which it was one. With this premature loss of unity, the infant comes into the world without instinctive self-identity. We experience this lack of being as primal desire.
Embryology suggests that, compared to other mammals, the intrauterine existence of sapiens is short and the infant arrives early, in an incomplete state. This biological condition results in the infant being born without a maturely developed ego and instinct. This state of lack requires prolonged, intensive social caring and ultimately shapes a psychic desire for recognition, and ultimately, desire for prestige (1991:48).
Psychoanalytic theory carves the path of desire beginning with the object relation the infant has with the partial body of the primal mother, body parts which it sees as its own extended organ. In this configuration of psychic space, there is no organised ego or centre of consciousness.
Through the mother’s ‘cunning,’ creative nurturing, the infant’s psychic space is reconfigured into a fictive egocentric world of object relations. With the infant’s demands entirely dependent on the mother’s caprice, it learns to cry not only for hunger or need but also for attentive recognition. A bond of desire ensues between infant and mother; the infant’s desire is to be desired by the mother.
The object of desire is desire itself – the subject desires not the object, but the specular image of a unified being, a fixed, statue of the ego. Desire, then, writes Borch-Jacobson, ‘organises itself into imaginary scenarios, where it imagines (itself in) an object.’ Note how often adolescents, when looking at an object of fashion, strike out and say, ‘Oh, that is so me.’
The mirror stage, when the toddler speculates the magical correspondence between spectral image and selfhood – when the toddler imagines itself as the imaginary object (the mirror) – marks the emergence of the ego. In the mirror, remark Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘there is a sort of coalescence of the signifier with the signified,’ a misrecognition that the imaginary and the object are one and the same thing.
The imaginary is not simply a phase we can outgrow like thumb-sucking, asserts Lacan, but the very inner structure of the ego; it is an ineradicable dimension of all human experience. The infantile gloating and frolicking to its image in the mirror continuous into adulthood. It lives on in our later libidinal investments when we identify with all sorts of objects that bring some comforting likeness to ourselves. ‘It is around the wandering shadow of his own ego’, Lacan suggests, ‘that will be structured all the objects of (the human) world’ (Eagleton 2009:8).
The adolescent’s later passage from maternal metaphor to paternal metaphor, from imaginary self to symbolic subject, is a transition of desire from the closed realm of the ego to the open, conscious field of individuality. Assuming a location in the symbolic index means taking up a discursive position and leaving the ego behind. To become a conscious subject means to take on exchangeable functions within a system of symbolic roles.
Like with the signifier, identity for the subject is a differential affair. For example, in the discourse of the family, individuality is not defined by the image one has of oneself as, say, a father. Instead, identity of fatherhood can only be defined by difference to other symbolic roles, such as those of mother, grandparent, child, cousin and so forth. In the discourse of the vase, the potter’s identity is by difference to other signifiers within the same field, such as peasant potter, studio potter, designer, ceramic dealer, and collector, and so forth.
Trying to escape symbolic desire with combinations from unrelated fields such as mother potter, designer cousin, and artist son is a throwback into the egotist world of narcissist reflection because it subverts the relations of symbolic order.
Without a transcendental signifier, one that would unify the subject’s identity permanently and give voice to his being as a whole, the subject remains lacking – the ‘I’ and ‘self’ remain eternal strangers to one another. As Lacan puts it, the subject is forever split between ego and symbolic order – the self and Other. As adolescent, one desires the image of ego – as subject, one desires the symbolic other. But desire it must remain, because unification with the object of desire results in disorders such as bulimia and psychosis.
It is in this context, the acceptance that desire is a perpetual unresolved experience to a destination that always recedes and defers, that the ethical function of the beautiful comes into play.
The function of the beautiful is not to let the subject give in to his desire or become neurotically stuck to a singular signified. Instead, the superficiality of the beautiful attracts fascination and keeps the subject fixated, at a distance. With desire sustained, the object can be contemplated, and subjectivity reconfigured.
The function of the beautiful
In his seminar on the function of the beautiful, Lacan shifts the location of beauty from content to form in the same way that psychoanalysis cures by exchanging the content of the maternal body for symbolic forms of maternal relations.
Lacan remarks on his predecessor Freud’s theoretical inadequacies and grotesque approach to modern aesthetics. For Freud, the art object is a commodity product in the field of goods amongst competing egos. The artist, Freud claims, gives beautiful form to the forbidden object in order that everyone, by buying his little artistic product, rewards and sanctions his daring (De Kesel 2009:238).
Lacan negates the platonic function of the good by pointing to its limit. There is no inherent good in the signifier, the good is always the signified attributed to the object by the desiring subject, and always within context to some prevailing custom – it identifies and conform to some or other social demand. In other words, to do good is a desire for prestige and social recognition.
Beyond the good, we meet the psychological nuance of malaise; of jealousy, in relation to the pleasure or superabundant vitality held by another. ‘Isn't it strange, very odd,’ Lacan asks, ‘that a being admits to being jealous of something in the other to the point of hatred and the need to destroy, jealous of something that he is incapable of apprehending in any way, by any intuitive path?’
To apprehend malaise and find catharsis against the competition for goods, conflict between goods, and its catastrophic turnaround, some distant cultures have found ceremonial function in the destruction of goods, Lacan tells us in his seminar on ethics. To enhance prestige, a North American Indian culture performed public ceremonies called potlach in which surplus goods were destroyed.
A similar festival of destruction, Lacan tells us, was practiced by feudal Lords in medieval Europe. Barons in the region of Narbonne challenged each other in ceremonious rivalry to destroy each other’s privileged possessions. This retreat from goods seemed to have functioned as a form of maintenance and discipline of desire.
It has been understood since antiquity that human desire surfaces when the subject faces the signifier and mediates meaning. Through cultural intervention, desire can be negotiated, as noted by Saint Thomas when he claimed that beauty has a mysterious way of intimidating, arresting and disarming desire. Beauty has the same lure as the economy of the good, but instead of drawing us in with numbing outrage, it alerts us to our desire.
Lacan explains that beauty is a skin deep, palpable image. Its gentle gravity awakens one and allows one to orbit like planets around the sun, without being lured too close and suffer the unbearable pain of destruction. Beauty provides a Goldilocks orbit from where the aesthetic object can be contemplated, at a distance – it is a zone of phantasm and catharsis.
To exemplify his psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics, Lacan references the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, by Sophocles. Antigone is an impossible, self-willed character whose disorderly deviance against the law, for which there is no logical or judicial outcome, puts her and her family on an abysmal path to self-destruction. Her character both terrifies and seduces the audience, sucking them in to the trauma of her destiny, death.
The Chorus, whose beautiful, enigmatic voice is central to the theatrical convention of Greek tragedy, mediates between Antigone’s raw, disorderly passions and the audience’s imaginary sympathy. The orderly form of the Chorus keeps the audience’s conscience at a safe distance and does the impossible, emotional commentary on their behalf. Lacan tells us, ‘It is just sufficiently silly; it is also not without firmness; it is more or less human. Therefore, you don't have to worry; even if you don't feel anything, the Chorus will feel in your stead’ (1992:252).
At the crucial moment when the hopeless Antigone is sentenced to death, the Chorus intervenes and sings a beautiful ode of love dedicated to Antigone, raising her to the dignity and splendour of a heroine. At that phantasmagorical moment, one signified is exchanged for another; the Chorus bestows her with a radiancy that befits a heroine’s defiance against the tyranny of the state. The artificial mechanism of the Chorus form transforms the signifier that Antigone is, from criminal to heroine, thereby sustaining the desire of the audience and deferring symbolic closure.
The ancient vase
In the Antikensammlung collection in Munich is an Athenian Red Figure ceramic vase by Kleophrades Painter, dated 510-470 BC.
Encircling the body of the vase on the continuous frieze is a visual narration of Dionysus, god of the wine harvest, with his unruly followers, the maenads and satyrs. It is a stock scene of wine-drunk immortals indulging in orgiastic pleasure. Dionysus holds an empty wine cup while a nymph maenad fends off the erotic advances of her companion, the nude ithyphallic satyr.
Around the neck of the vase is a contrasting visual representation, narrating the daily mortal life of sober Athenian athletes. The nude athletes practice discus and spear throwing for the Olympian Games, which is a symbolic rite of discipline in honour of the Olympian god Zeus.
In the ancient, enchanted world, the Real was the inaccessible domain of the gods, from where they ruled all forms of Athenian convention that consumed mortal life. Dionysus was the enigmatic mediator between mortals and immortals; the wine festivals served as symbolic rite for imaginary dialogue between Athenians and their enchanted culture.
The vase object consists of three signifiers:
1. The first is the shaped ceramic template, indexed as amphorae (wine containers), which distinguishes it from other containers. Amphorae signify wine.
2. The second signifier is the artistic representation painted on the amphora. It is a representation of two distinct forms of convention, the one signifies the wine festival of Dionysus and the other signifies Zeus’s athletic games.
3. The third signifier do not signify, it is the void around which the potter shaped the clay – It is the unrepresentable Real, the domain of the gods. The enigmatic void is the supportive structure for the first two signifiers, it is irremovable – without the void, the entire constellation of signifiers collapse.
The empty signifier at the core of the constellation is the object of desire. The wine festival embodies this desire – the symbolic embodiment of dialogue with the gods, in the form of the festival. The convention of the festival is a fantasy event, and its customary practice is regulated by the discourse of Zeus and Dionysus. Zeus articulates distant discipline, like that of athletes. Dionysus articulates caution against getting too close to the unruly maenad and satyr.
The objective of the wine festival is to bring Athenians to a state of euphonic epiphany; to contemplate the Real at a sustainable distance; and to ponder the gods without falling prey to the maenad and satyr.
In other words, we have a trajectory of signifiers. The beauty of the painted art on the vase signifies the fantasy event – the beautiful frames the fantasy. And in turn, fantasy coordinates Athenian desire during their participation in the festival.
The artistic representation is a guide for cautionary behaviour during the fantasy of the festival, keeping the subject within the Goldilocks zone of safety from where desire can be sustained, and symbolic subjectivity reimagined. The sublime vase signifies wholeness and social well-being within the Olympian culture.
Johannes Scott, November 2021
Sources:
Borch-Jacobson, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 2009. Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Lacan, Jacques. Seminar VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (J-A. Miller, Ed. and D. Porter, Trans.) (1992). New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); and with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.