Jockum Nordström: Family Trait: collage on paper, 2006
In my last post on the void I mentioned Dave Edgar's reference to Alain Badiou, who was in turn writing a piece for the magazine 'Lacanian Ink'. While I'm ruminating on perception, I'm afraid I'm going to continue to unpick some ideas about how drawing can sit in that gap between perception and reality, especially because I've been asked to make a series of drawings that communicate what it's like to have tinnitus.
Tinnitus is a condition whereby we constantly hallucinate sound. These hallucinations interfere with our ability to respond to the real perceived needs of our body and as such can be a real problem for the sufferer. But as these 'sounds' have no grounding in external events, they are very hard to communicate to others who of course cannot hear them. So my problem is, how can drawing help in communicating the issue? The fact that it can externalise an inner feeling or sensation is central to my understanding of drawing's possibility as a conduit between two people, so I'm interested in any ideas that suggest ways that drawing can operate as an extended mind or how our visual imagination can be put to use as a communication tool.
Lacan helps us to think about how personality could extend beyond the limits of our bodies. In showing how personality is extended and constituted within a social network he indicated how our identities could include elements outside the boundaries of ourselves. For instance I might measure myself against another person and judge myself and my actions in relation to what I thought that person represented to myself, their existence then eventually becomes part of my own. If there is something I find difficult in other people it is lack of self doubt. But in the confidence of others, I find my own identity, one that over the years I have come to accept as riddled with worries, a condition framed in a composition that includes both myself and all those others who I have used to help shape my somewhat damaged ego.
This type of thinking and Lacan's long association with the Surrealist movement, was a catalyst for the development of ideas about how art could itself embody the extended personality of the artist and in turn affect other people.
His argument in relation to the mirror phase is one aspect of this ability to identify with things or images outside of oneself. This type of identification allows us to move on beyond our former selves. A child sees an older child doing something it cant and so it tries to mirror the older child's behaviour and in doing so gradually becomes able to do something it could not do before. Again this idea was taken up by artists and theorists because it helped to explain how an object like an artwork that is external to other humans, could begin to have an affect on others. Indeed Lacan's term the 'imaginary' emphasised the importance of vision and how we achieve mastery over ourselves and our abilities by imaginative appropriation of the skills or abilities of others. We are born incomplete, a baby with no abilities and Lacan argued that the process of acquiring the skills we need to become an adult was what eventually would constitute the ego.
In using the imaginary as a process of growth or realisation, Lacan opens the door to a reading of art-making as being a process that is also to do with self realisation.
Badiou proposed a short definition of Drawing one that drew its inspiration from a Wallace Stevens poem, “Description without Place.”
He states; 'This is my definition of art : Every work of art, especially every work in contemporary arts, is a description without place.' He asks, ...'what is a Drawing?' and answers himself thus, 'A Drawing is a complex of marks. These marks have no place. Why? Because in a true Drawing, a creative one, the marks, the traces, the lines, are not included or closeted in the background. On the contrary, the marks, the lines—the forms, if you will—create the background as an open space. They create what Mallarmé names, “the empty paper which is protected by its whiteness.” ' It's interesting that Badiou then chooses a collage artist to illustrate the writing, because we then have to read the collage as a complex of marks, the cutting out and placing bits of paper being seen as a process very similar to the marking of paper with a pencil or charcoal. Nordström as an artist can easily be read as a maker of marks with paper, as he obviously prepares his paper surfaces carefully before cutting them out and in the cutting always maintains a very particular and apparently simple, formal set of principles.
Badiou goes on to tell us that in a drawing some marks create an inexistent place. (non-existent) and as a result, 'we have a description without place'. ...'There is a Drawing when some trace without place creates as its place an empty surface.'
He then goes on to quote from Wallace Stevens
It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.
This space between things is I think one that is very like Plato's thoughts on the cave of perception, whereby he says that we only see of reality the equivalent to shadows cast on a cave wall by the light of a fire. His shadows are the echo sounding device's bleeps. From them we deduct ideas about what we think the world is like.
Badiou then goes on to state that, 'The work of art is a description which has no immediate relationship with a real that would be outside the description.' and then later,...'The pure Drawing is the material visibility of invisibility.'
He then sums up;
1. The best definition for a work of art is: description without place.
2. This description is always a link between real being and seeming, or appearing.
3. This link is not purely symbolic. We do not need to go beyond appearances to find the Real. The description is not a sign for something that lays outside its form.
4. This link is not a pure revelation. It is not the coming down of the absolute Idea, or of the infinite, in a beautiful form. Appearing is not like a formal body of being. It is therefore necessary to consider a new link between appearing and being.
From this summery Badiou sets out an action plan:
'Our new task is to explain four features of the work of art as a description without place:
1. The description is “artificial thing that exists.” Artificiality. Drawing is something which is composed. It is the question of technology. Today the background can be a screen, and not a piece of paper, and the marks can be the visible projection of immaterial numbers.
2. The description is “in its own seeming.” There is an independent existence in appearances. Drawing must exist without any external explanation. And without external references.
3. But the description is not “too closely the double of our lives.” A true Drawing is not a copy of something. It is a constructive deconstruction of something, and much more real than the initial thing.
4. The description is “intenser than any actual life.” A Drawing is fragile. But it creates a very intense fragility. In short:
—First, being is purely a mathematical abstraction. It is, in any thing, the multiple without any quality or determination. Drawing seizes this definition by reducing any thing to a system of marks.
—Second, when a thing appears as a degree of intensity, we have nothing else than the existence of the thing in a world. A thing exists more or less, and the intensity has no relation with being, but only with the concrete world in which the thing appears. In Drawing, the world is symbolized by the background, pages, screen, or wall.
—Third, there is no question of imitation or of representation. The existence of a multiplicity is directly its appearing in a world, with a new measure of the intensity of this appearing.
Within this framework, we can reconstruct our theory of a work of art as a point where appearing and being are indiscernible.'
Of course we could argue with several of the points he makes but as a way of opening out ways of thinking about drawing and its relationship to how we perceive the world it is very useful. In particular if we remember the context of the initial writing, which was in 'Lacanian Ink', a publication devoted to opening out thinking in relation to the psychological writings of Lacan. My own reading of this is as another example of how our thinking could extend beyond the limits of our bodies and of how drawing could be thought of as an external self. In my recent conversations about tinnitus I have discovered that some sufferers 'hear' the imaginary sounds as if they exist outside of the head, sometimes more on one side than another. Sometimes these sounds exist as if they are spaces that the head passes through and for other people it all goes on inside the head.
This type of thinking and Lacan's long association with the Surrealist movement, was a catalyst for the development of ideas about how art could itself embody the extended personality of the artist and in turn affect other people.
His argument in relation to the mirror phase is one aspect of this ability to identify with things or images outside of oneself. This type of identification allows us to move on beyond our former selves. A child sees an older child doing something it cant and so it tries to mirror the older child's behaviour and in doing so gradually becomes able to do something it could not do before. Again this idea was taken up by artists and theorists because it helped to explain how an object like an artwork that is external to other humans, could begin to have an affect on others. Indeed Lacan's term the 'imaginary' emphasised the importance of vision and how we achieve mastery over ourselves and our abilities by imaginative appropriation of the skills or abilities of others. We are born incomplete, a baby with no abilities and Lacan argued that the process of acquiring the skills we need to become an adult was what eventually would constitute the ego.
In using the imaginary as a process of growth or realisation, Lacan opens the door to a reading of art-making as being a process that is also to do with self realisation.
Originally appearing in lacanian ink 28, Alain Badiou wrote a piece on drawing, that used a work by Jockum Nordström as an illustration of his ideas. Nordström's works on paper, in particular, read like storyboards, and he has often referred to them as "stills," and I presume his work was chosen as an illustration of Lacanian thought because it can be read as encounters of humans with others, the elements of which float on a paper's white surface, almost like islands, a situation which Badiou regards as a fragile non space.
Jockum Nordström
Badiou proposed a short definition of Drawing one that drew its inspiration from a Wallace Stevens poem, “Description without Place.”
He states; 'This is my definition of art : Every work of art, especially every work in contemporary arts, is a description without place.' He asks, ...'what is a Drawing?' and answers himself thus, 'A Drawing is a complex of marks. These marks have no place. Why? Because in a true Drawing, a creative one, the marks, the traces, the lines, are not included or closeted in the background. On the contrary, the marks, the lines—the forms, if you will—create the background as an open space. They create what Mallarmé names, “the empty paper which is protected by its whiteness.” ' It's interesting that Badiou then chooses a collage artist to illustrate the writing, because we then have to read the collage as a complex of marks, the cutting out and placing bits of paper being seen as a process very similar to the marking of paper with a pencil or charcoal. Nordström as an artist can easily be read as a maker of marks with paper, as he obviously prepares his paper surfaces carefully before cutting them out and in the cutting always maintains a very particular and apparently simple, formal set of principles.
Badiou goes on to tell us that in a drawing some marks create an inexistent place. (non-existent) and as a result, 'we have a description without place'. ...'There is a Drawing when some trace without place creates as its place an empty surface.'
He then goes on to quote from Wallace Stevens
It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.
The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.
Badiou takes from these few lines an idea that is about perception and consciousness.
So the artistic idea of a description without place is in a close relationship with the old philosophical question of being and seeming. Or of being qua being and appearing—to be and to appear—appearing precisely in a place, in a tangible world. The sun is, and it is something seeming, and in Poetry, we must name “sun” neither the fact that the sun is, nor the fact that the sun seems, or appears, but we must name “sun” the equivalence of seeming and being, the inseparability of being and appearing. And finally, the equivalence of to exist and not to exist.
This fascinated me, because I have been looking at perception and interoception and how to visualise things that when you think about them begin to slip away from reality. Anil Seth in his book 'Being You' attempts to explain this situation in another way. He asks, 'What if perception was a controlled hallucination?' (2021, p. 84) Hallucinations are internally generated perceptions, but so are interoceptions. I cant see a pain, but my body feels it and relays sensations about it to the brain. However at the same time a sound idea generated by the brain as in tinnitus, is also relayed as sensations to the brain. Normal perceptions are supposed to be reflections of things that actually exist in the world. However all of these types of perceptions, involve internally generated predictions about the causes of sensory inputs and all use the same set of chemical and electrical mechanisms. Imagine you are in a submarine using an echo sounding device as your perceptual apparatus. You read a series of beeps as changes in the depth of the sea floor or the sudden approach of a whale or another submarine. But what if there is a form of static that causes other bleeps to occur? The beeps are just bleeps but it is your suppositional reading of them that turns them into ideas of a sea bottom shape, or a whale or a shoal of fish. These are all best guesses based on previous experiences, which is very similar to the situation we are in. Our brain receives lots of constantly changing signals and we do our best to imagine what these signals represent. But just as the bleeps picked up by the echo sounding equipment are not the reality of the sea floor, the chemical and electrical signals received by our brains are not the same as the 'real' world.
So the artistic idea of a description without place is in a close relationship with the old philosophical question of being and seeming. Or of being qua being and appearing—to be and to appear—appearing precisely in a place, in a tangible world. The sun is, and it is something seeming, and in Poetry, we must name “sun” neither the fact that the sun is, nor the fact that the sun seems, or appears, but we must name “sun” the equivalence of seeming and being, the inseparability of being and appearing. And finally, the equivalence of to exist and not to exist.
This fascinated me, because I have been looking at perception and interoception and how to visualise things that when you think about them begin to slip away from reality. Anil Seth in his book 'Being You' attempts to explain this situation in another way. He asks, 'What if perception was a controlled hallucination?' (2021, p. 84) Hallucinations are internally generated perceptions, but so are interoceptions. I cant see a pain, but my body feels it and relays sensations about it to the brain. However at the same time a sound idea generated by the brain as in tinnitus, is also relayed as sensations to the brain. Normal perceptions are supposed to be reflections of things that actually exist in the world. However all of these types of perceptions, involve internally generated predictions about the causes of sensory inputs and all use the same set of chemical and electrical mechanisms. Imagine you are in a submarine using an echo sounding device as your perceptual apparatus. You read a series of beeps as changes in the depth of the sea floor or the sudden approach of a whale or another submarine. But what if there is a form of static that causes other bleeps to occur? The beeps are just bleeps but it is your suppositional reading of them that turns them into ideas of a sea bottom shape, or a whale or a shoal of fish. These are all best guesses based on previous experiences, which is very similar to the situation we are in. Our brain receives lots of constantly changing signals and we do our best to imagine what these signals represent. But just as the bleeps picked up by the echo sounding equipment are not the reality of the sea floor, the chemical and electrical signals received by our brains are not the same as the 'real' world.
Jockum Nordström puts his collaged figures into mobile non space
Badiou has this to say about drawing. 'That is exactly the problem of Drawing. In one sense, the paper exists, as a material support, as a closed totality; and the marks, or the lines, do not exist by themselves: they have to compose something inside the paper. But in an other and more crucial sense, the paper as a background does not exist, because it is created as such, as an open surface, by the marks. It is that sort of movable reciprocity between existence and inexistence which constitutes the very essence of Drawing. The question of Drawing is very different from the question in Hamlet. It is not “to be or not to be,” it is “to be and not to be.” And that is the reason for the fundamental fragility of Drawing: not a clear alternative, to be or not to be, but an obscure and paradoxical conjunction, to be and not to be. Or, as Deleuze would say: a disjunctive synthesis.
This space between things is I think one that is very like Plato's thoughts on the cave of perception, whereby he says that we only see of reality the equivalent to shadows cast on a cave wall by the light of a fire. His shadows are the echo sounding device's bleeps. From them we deduct ideas about what we think the world is like.
Badiou then goes on to state that, 'The work of art is a description which has no immediate relationship with a real that would be outside the description.' and then later,...'The pure Drawing is the material visibility of invisibility.'
He then sums up;
1. The best definition for a work of art is: description without place.
2. This description is always a link between real being and seeming, or appearing.
3. This link is not purely symbolic. We do not need to go beyond appearances to find the Real. The description is not a sign for something that lays outside its form.
4. This link is not a pure revelation. It is not the coming down of the absolute Idea, or of the infinite, in a beautiful form. Appearing is not like a formal body of being. It is therefore necessary to consider a new link between appearing and being.
From this summery Badiou sets out an action plan:
'Our new task is to explain four features of the work of art as a description without place:
1. The description is “artificial thing that exists.” Artificiality. Drawing is something which is composed. It is the question of technology. Today the background can be a screen, and not a piece of paper, and the marks can be the visible projection of immaterial numbers.
2. The description is “in its own seeming.” There is an independent existence in appearances. Drawing must exist without any external explanation. And without external references.
3. But the description is not “too closely the double of our lives.” A true Drawing is not a copy of something. It is a constructive deconstruction of something, and much more real than the initial thing.
4. The description is “intenser than any actual life.” A Drawing is fragile. But it creates a very intense fragility. In short:
—First, being is purely a mathematical abstraction. It is, in any thing, the multiple without any quality or determination. Drawing seizes this definition by reducing any thing to a system of marks.
—Second, when a thing appears as a degree of intensity, we have nothing else than the existence of the thing in a world. A thing exists more or less, and the intensity has no relation with being, but only with the concrete world in which the thing appears. In Drawing, the world is symbolized by the background, pages, screen, or wall.
—Third, there is no question of imitation or of representation. The existence of a multiplicity is directly its appearing in a world, with a new measure of the intensity of this appearing.
Within this framework, we can reconstruct our theory of a work of art as a point where appearing and being are indiscernible.'
Of course we could argue with several of the points he makes but as a way of opening out ways of thinking about drawing and its relationship to how we perceive the world it is very useful. In particular if we remember the context of the initial writing, which was in 'Lacanian Ink', a publication devoted to opening out thinking in relation to the psychological writings of Lacan. My own reading of this is as another example of how our thinking could extend beyond the limits of our bodies and of how drawing could be thought of as an external self. In my recent conversations about tinnitus I have discovered that some sufferers 'hear' the imaginary sounds as if they exist outside of the head, sometimes more on one side than another. Sometimes these sounds exist as if they are spaces that the head passes through and for other people it all goes on inside the head.
An image beginning to be constructed in response to a series of conversations attempting to find an image that would as accurately as possible reflect an individual's felt experience of dealing with tinnitus.
See also:
For an alternative approach to Lacan try:
BRIAN GROSSKURTH, Drawing on Lacan, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 17, Issue 2, 1994, Pages 138–142,
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