The potter’s vase embodies our psychodynamic.
We fabricated the clay vase at our very beginning in the Levant, at the end of the Palaeolithic era after Homo sapiens evolved from other hominids to emerge as symbolic subjects.
Like the mythical creator, the potter shapes the vase around nihil, a void of nothingness, and brings the prospect of emptiness and fullness to language – to the word, in the Biblical sense of genesis. Through its form and inscribed beauty, frozen as imaginary figure around a vacuole, we conceive parables and analogies to the meaning of our existence.
Preceding the potter’s vase, in the prehistoric moment of making the cognitive leap from hunter-gatherers to settling in the Levant, sapiens produced the apex of Palaeolithic cave art at Altamira, considered to be the Sistine Chapel of primitive art. Both the vase and cave art follow the same topology, an imaginary veil created around a void – ex nihilo (formed from nothing).
Psychoanalytic theory takes the structure of the veiled void as foundation for the psychodynamic of sapiens. Beginning with the cognitive revolution 70 000 years ago, through the agricultural revolution in the Levant to contemporary post-industrial culture. Throughout, we have maintained the same psychodynamic – a symbolic world shaped by imaginary representation centred around a core of lack.
Our lacking psychodynamic is the result of premature birth, born before being an ego. Homo erectus and other hominids, in fact, all mammals are born as if they are vitrified porcelain – fixed at birth and requiring minimum nurturing. Try and change them and they shatter. Sapiens, on the other hand, are born like a clean slate. Lacking mature instinct, the infant requires prolonged social nurturing to survive. Only sapiens developed the imaginative skill to hunt cunningly – Homo erectus, on the other hand, were short, stocky scavengers, relying on a fully developed instinct.
The cause of the premature birth is anatomical, according to the embryologist Louis Bolk. The bipedalism of Homo erectus caused a narrowing of hips, inconsequential to the female pelvis during delivery due to the embryo’s relatively small cranium. On the other hand, the consequence for Homo sapiens and their large adult cranium is that childbirth occurs before the cranium reaches its natural embryonic size, resulting in a lack of full prenatal development.
Sapiens lack mature instinct, are disconnected with the natural world, and exist on the remotest edges of ecological development. It is an ecological fact that the human is not the apex of evolution – we are, however, the torchbearer of an imaginary world.
One can argue that the Darwinian ‘missing link’ separating hominids and humans is not lost somewhere in the Lower Palaeolithic, but instead, is here in plain sight. The infant sapient is like a premature hominid – the ‘missing link’ is not some distant, evolutionary marker, it is the omnipresence of the lacking cranium. The human being is the psychodynamic sum of lack and desire – ex nihilo (formed from nothing).
For psychoanalytic theory, the human infant is born helpless. The first external object it encounters is the maternal caretaker, the socialised mother whose primordial image it internalises. Capable of only inarticulate vocals, the mother always replies to the infant’s cry and an object relation of desire ensues. For the infant, it is at the mercy of the mother’s desire, and, like all desire, desire is the other’s desire. The infant’s desire is to be desired by the mother.
The psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva compares this prelinguistic experience of infancy to stormy seas, felt as an oceanic feeling. She describes it as the inaugural experience of the ego, dominated by sensations of intimate union with the surrounding world but without yet having established borders between ego and the maternal, primordial body.
The subliminatory cycle of pretence begins here with the hold the mother has over the infant, substituting the primordial real with the imaginary world of speech and tales, explains Kristeva. By undermining the fixity of the ego, desire for the real is redirected to desire for ideality. Ideality, such as the syndrome of paradise in which the subjective illusion of a specular, conscious ‘I’ is egocentric. The mother unleashes creative potential and, as Freud noted, boys often declare themselves poets during puberty to avow the ego.
By the end of puberty, the adolescent’s drive of desire is redirected again, from maternal metaphor to paternal metaphor. The intervention of the symbolic father with its legislative and prohibitive function, as distinct from narcissistic desire, introduces symbolic distance to the exclusive mother-child bond. This redirection of desires grounds mental sanity.
The symbolic function is like an imaginary social contract of agreement. It transforms the adolescent to become a full member of the human order, transitioning from self-centred microcosm to the norms and conventions of a macrocosmic world. From inner-directed to an external world of cultural sublimation in which the entire society is caught up.
We can get a glimpse of such cultural sublimation in the work of palaeolithic hunter artists at the caves of Altamira in Spain. The life-like representations of wildlife, hunters, and human hands were skilfully painted deep in the underground chambers. These were not egocentric endeavours, the art was produced for objective reflection by the late stone age, subsistence community.
The art was executed with the intent to be viewed by visitors because only the cave entrance was used for dwelling. The deep twisting passages and chambers have no natural light and visitors would have been escorted by late stone age guides with fire torches. Similarly, the artists would have used animal-fat stone lamps to create a striking, three-dimensional impression of the animal herds on the curving contours of the cave walls.
Because the paintings were created and recreated by generations of artists, from 14 to 18 000 years ago, one can assume the caves were a well-known destination for generations of late stone age visitors, travelling from far to bear witness to the sublime. Or as Jacques Lacan puts it, to bear witness to the intimate exteriority, or “extimacy;” an emptiness or void at the core of art that lures desiring spectators.
On entering the deep chamber, the Palaeolithic spectator would be captivated by phantasmagoria. The animal representations would literally seem thrown up onto the surrounding walls by strategically placed fire torches, like the projection of a cinematic, anamorphic lens. Moreover, the spectator, like in a cinema, would be positioned in the dark, as if observing the panoramic, life-size setting from within a safe hide.
This unhurried experience is impossible in external, real-life. In the raw natural world, a close-up confrontation with a wild animal is rapid and chaotic; perception is brief and fragmented. Meaning is instantaneous – the animal’s roar results in a fight-or-flee response; wasting time to think spells death.
In the fantasy setting, the viewer has time to digest symbolic meaning. This is the operation of sublimation; it is speculative and optional. One object can be exchanged for another, and their respective consequences calculated, and synchronically repeated. In the signifying chain between signifier and the sliding signified, sublimation slows down the connection between object and meaning – desire slows down.
The representation thrown onto the cave wall is like an artificial cut taken from the real, but the cut no longer has equivalence to the real. The representation is an empty object, a pale apparition. It lacks the intimacy of the actual encounter with the primordial real. It is this lack that sustains desire, keeps the viewer dangling and fixated at the imaginary level.
The drive of unconscious desire has the same structure as the representation. Lacan describes the unconscious as being structured like language. The unconscious structure mediates between metaphoric exchange and the movement of metonymy – condensation and displacement. Objects and events can be relocated for alternative results of contiguity.
In the mediation between the real and the artificial, the Palaeolithic spectator establishes new symbolic associations and affirms collective imaginary meaning to the consciousness of subsistence existence. As the stone age visitor leaves the cave, and glances back, taking in that last gaze of the spectre, social consciousness about the external world is sustained.
These stone age cultural expeditions into the caves at Altamira may have signified as religious instruction or tutorial for subsistence hunters, or some or other fantasy unknown to us. Either way, the psychodynamic operative is no different than those complex societies that settled a couple of thousand years later in the Levant, shaping the imaginary foundation of our modern symbolic world with signifiers such as the Phoenician alphabet, Arabic algebra, Cretan art, and the Abrahamic tradition.
Sublimation generates socially recognized values.
The imaginary aspect of sublimation operates as a kind of tool for refashioning social norms that can resolve problematic issues such as social identity. As Julia Kristeva would put it, desire stimulates the ability to believe in tomorrow – it delays the death drive. Without imaginary mediation, we revert to a microcosm of adolescent culture where the libido and ego rules.
Kristeva asserts that the uncompromised ideal for pure, ‘true’ identity negates desire and results in neuroses such as depression, addiction, anorexia, and adolescent disputes like, “If I don’t have everything, I am bored.” Moreover, she claims that when the religious subject claims effortless, factual, and direct access to the real without the imaginary mediation of believing, the fundamentalist death drive, or ‘kamikaze’ effect as she names it, advances.
In modern European fine art, representation denounces the egocentricity of 19th century Realism and shifts focus to the substructure of art, its formal technique, which is always historically situated. For example, in the movement from post-impressionism to futurism, cubism and surrealism, formal technique shifts alongside a historical timeline limited to the first half of the 20th century. Meaning and interpretation was no longer the domain of the 19th century romantic individual, instead, aesthetic appreciation shifted to the synchronised rubric of culture.
Representation in modern art heralds a new imaginary image that, by optical transposition, reveals a hidden reality. Once the seemingly random, contingent dispersion of scraps of colour on the canvas emerges as sublimation for the real, in other words, emerges as substructure or technique, the viewer begins to experience insight to modern art as aesthetic pleasure.
Insight is provided by what lies external to the individual viewer, beyond the screen of colour pigment on canvas. It is beyond the signifier, in the fantasy setting of art discourse, that symbolic meaning emerges. Recognising formal aspects of, say, the cubist technique, the cultivated viewer can experience the entire protocol of the modern art spectacle as generated by the socially recognised values of cubism.
The image emerges, writes de Kesel, from an external, separate thing frozen in a neutral and autonomous fantasy. He goes on, “Such an anamorphosis enables us to see, however, how the image is clearly formed behind the mirror, in a space where, in contrast to a flat mirror, we immediately realize that there is absolutely nothing—certainly no reality that is the putative point of the image.”
The sublime Vase
Lacan explains the structure of sublimation as that of an object relation between an artificial representation and the real, original ‘thing’ that lies beyond our symbolic world. It is our desire to intervene between the empty object and the real thing, to interpret and give meaning to the sublime relation between the two.
For Lacan, the potter’s vase exemplifies our mediation between representation and the real. The potter, he tells us in his seminar, creates the vase with his hands around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole. A void is created and thereby the possibility to fill it, in the same sense that speech and discourse may be empty or filled with signification.
The vase in itself signifies nothing, and no merit should be attributed to it. The merit of the vase is that what may emerge from it, or what it may be filled with – desire and interpretation. The signifying function of the vase is always limited by the social context of its imaginary representation.
From a loved one, one receives a vase filled with cut flowers, an urn filled with dust; from the shop, a lidded jar labelled jam; from the curator of a museum, an empty artifact; a potter’s vase filled to the brim with liquid gold. In every sense, aesthetic reception of the vase is determined by what lies beyond it, in the socially recognised context of culture.
Johannes Scott, July 2021
SOURCES:
De Kesel, Marc. 2009. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Evans, Dylan. 1996. Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2014. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage
Kristeva, Julia. 2009. This Incredible Need to Believe. NY: Columbia University Press
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.