UNCANNY
The Tate Gallery in London provides a list of art terms that orientates aesthetic conception and guides visitors when viewing art exhibitions. One of these concepts is UNCANNY; the term is indexed with catalogue reference to an exhibition titled The Uncanny by Mike Kelly at Tate Liverpool.
The Tate explains the uncanny first in reference to German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay on the psychology of ‘unheimlich,’ the unhomely – the psychological effect of something new and unknown. This explanation is followed with focus on the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, in which he reformulates Jentsch’s idea. For him, the uncanny is not only the unknown, but also the appearance of something that was previously concealed.
Unbeknown to Freud, whose ideas about inner life were still shaped by the previous century’s Idealism, a Swiss theoretical linguist laid the foundations of Modern theory and new light on the concept of the uncanny. In Course of General Linguistics (1906-11), Ferdinand de Saussure argued that we have no direct access to the appearance of reality, that our perception of the world is always mediated by, and dependent on language. This theory relocates the uncanny from the inner life to the socio-cultural domain of the individual.
For de Saussure’s theory, language produces different social realities, not different personal versions of the same reality. It is not simply a naming process, instead, language turns meaningless, undifferentiated nature into a culturally differentiated social construct. Meaning, he argued, is created inside language and through the relations of different signs. For his study of the linguist sign, he separated the social aspect of symbolic language from that of common speech uttered by the individual – introducing the terms signifier and signified as components of the sign.
Applying de Saussure linguist theory, Jan Mukařovský, a literary aesthetician who received his 1922 doctoral degree in Prague, and member of the Czech avant-garde and Prague surrealist group, explored modern art theory in his essay on the question, What is art?. He wanted to establish scientifically why, as Aristotle famously said, poetic language sound strange and wonderful, unlike prose. Describing characteristics akin to Freud’s uncanny, Mukařovský referred to it as an ‘aesthetic function’ intended to slow down our autonomic reading of the artwork and prolong and intensify our intellectual perception.
By the 1920’s, also applying de Saussure’s theory, Russian Formalism inaugurated modern literary theory for the development of 20th-century modern art and culture. Also referring to characteristics akin to Freud’s uncanny, the Russian formalists used the term ‘defamiliarization’ (Russian: остранение or ostranenie). Coined by Viktor Shklovsky in his essay ‘Art as Device,’ defamiliarization is a literary technique intended to make the familiar seem strange, and to think poetry as image – habit is the foe of art, he argued. In his analysis of Tolstoy’s War and peace, in Theory of Prose, Shklovsky claims that what the author does to make the reader see the meaning of the novel in a new light is to deliberately recontextualise the familiar.
EXTIMACY | OBJET a
By 1968, during the twilight years of modern aesthetic theory, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan busied himself with reinventing not only de Saussure’s linguist theory, but also Freudian psychoanalysis. His translated academic corpus reaches the English world only at the beginning of the 21st-century, during the twilight years of postmodernist aesthetic theory. The contemporary significance of Lacan’s work is its ability to short-circuit the discourses of science and the literary, allowing for an interdisciplinary study that unifies the humanities and sciences. His theoretical work is currently unsurpassed in academic fields such as sociology, political theory, ethics, and aesthetics, with focus on theory of subjectivity and psychoanalytic desire.
Slovene founder of the Ljubljana Lacanian School and professor at the Department of Philosophy at University of Ljubljana, Mladen Dolar, suggest Lacan accounts for the Freudian uncanny with what he coins extimacy (extimité). The neologism stands for both interior and exterior, converging what is both intimate and foreign to us. Working against binary opposites, Lacan explains extimacy to operate like that of a Mobius strip. In later years, Lacan coins the term objet a, also known as the Thing, to account for the polyvalent complexity of extimacy. Objet a is a radically different kind of ‘object’ that resists symbolisation.
In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan goes through great lengths to explain how we register the world around us, how we make meaning out of the brute real that surrounds us. Simply put, our experience of reality is an unconscious, mental register mediated by language. We unconsciously exchange ‘dumb reality’ for a conventional word, a signifier, which registers as a mental image with symbolic meaning. In other words, we live in a world of mental, symbolic images, not brute reality. In this journey from brute object to mental abstraction, in this linguistic process of signification, some Thing escapes symbolisation and becomes lost, forever.
For the word that has taken the place of some or other brute object to have meaning, it must be registered in relation to other words, not the original object. For the signifier to signify, the signification of other signifiers is required – not brute reality. The brute object and the word – the Real Thing and the mental image – have parted, are lost to one another, and what is lost cannot be found. The impossibility for a return journey, back to the brute object, is a psychical cause of anxiety.
All that remains of that which is lost is a placeholder – a vacancy that designates absence. The meaning of words is built around this hollow core, an emptiness that is the placeholder of the brute object that is void. That is what Lacan means when he says that every imaginary and symbolic representation is perceived as lacking, and that this lack of the object is intimate to, and essential for our human experience. It is the imaginary image of the lost object that Lacan’s objet a represents – the Thing is the psychic object of human desire.
SUBLIMATION
Whereas Freud saw the uncanny as a reappearance of that which was psychically repressed, Lacan reintroduces the concept within context to cultural sublimation and its potential to invoke new social perspectives. Any object, Lacan argues, regardless of its social value, can be used as displacement object for artistic improvisation, converting an object of narcissistic desire into an object cause of desire.
Sublimation involves placing an object that has been decontextualised, or as he puts it, unhooked from its symbolic co-ordinates, in the position of the lost object of desire. The object is then converted to become the extimate/extimité (uncanny) centre around which new, fragmented meaning with multiple connotations form.
Sutured within the same constellation of signifiers where the Thing (objet a) previously evaded symbolisation, the aesthetically sublimated object now provides a new trajectory that enables conditions of possibility for the reconfiguration and expansion of the existing symbolic network.
The pivotal element to follow the deconstructive act is the creative play of sublime fantasy that reception sets in motion. Sublimation has the potential to coordinate a consequential aesthetic reception. The aesthetic produce offers a different form of satisfaction, one without social recognition or value. Or as Lacan puts it in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, ‘If it is a satisfaction, it is in this case one that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.’
Poetics of the Real | PETALS OF NARCISSUS | the artwork
When we cut flowers from nature, some primal Thing is lost. The absence of the Thing – the lack – is present within the flower vase convention. It is present as vacant place – a placeholder for the Thing that is void. This is the designated place for the uncanny object: objet a.
At the core of the flower-vase symbolic is lack, which we substitute for desire – but conventional fantasy cannot sustain desire. From within the void of the vase, below the rim, the intolerable wound of primal loss mounts. Unbearable; we conceal the traumatic rot in the trash bin.
PETALS OF NARCISSUS illuminates the residue of the primal Thing at its designated place. Sublimated at the rim of the vase, the artifice object is raised to the dignity of the Thing. Objet a is a nameless, uncanny object – a dramatized mass of primordial trauma entombed within the neck.
The artwork articulates the flower vase as deconstruction by unravelling the lacking symbolic order. With conventional trajectory exchanged for anamorphic trajectory, visual perception slows down to a phantasmatic gaze for reimagining fantasy and reconfiguring the flower-vase symbolic.
PETALS OF NARCISSUS represents a mausoleum for mourning anthropocentric ecocide. By sublimating concealment of primal trauma for the display of uncanny beauty, fascination lures the viewer into a distant orbit around the imaginary object from where desire is sustainable.
December 2021, Johannes Scott.
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.
Freud, Sigmund (1919). The “Uncanny”. Imago, Bd. V., 1919.
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.
Mladen Dolar (1991). “I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny. Author(s): Mladen Dolar Source: October, Vol. 58, Rendering the Real (Autumn, 1991), pp. 5-23 Published by: The MIT Press.
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; and 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.