The Borromean Knot

The Borromean Knot

I have looked at knots in the past because I like the way that they are both physical objects and powerful metaphors, they tie things together, mentally and physically. But now as I'm trying to get to grips with some alternative approaches to thinking about my own mental life, I have discovered a particular mental knot that is used to try to explain subjectivity or some of the key aspects of our mental life from a psychoanalytic point of view. 

In mathematics Borromean rings are three simple closed curves in three-dimensional space that are topologically linked and cannot be separated from each other. They break apart into unknotted and unlinked loops when any one of the three is cut or removed. I. e. the rings are held together only by the presence of all three. If any one of the rings is cut open, the entire structure falls apart. Sometimes this is represented by three overlapping circles, but this takes away the vital three dimensional nature of this idea, it doesn't work in two dimensions, so if you need to draw one you need to give the rings some form of three dimensional indicators, such as the white spaces in the drawing above, that indicate which part of the circle sits on top and which below. 

This construction was historically one of the heraldic symbols of the dukes of Borromeo, which is why it is called what it is. 

Odin's knot

In Norse mythology, triangles are used to express the same idea, (the Valknut) and topographically it makes no difference to the concept. The knot belongs to a tradition of thinking that is centred around the use of fibres to think with. In this case 'seidr', (Old Norse seiðr, 'cord, string, snare') was a form of shamanistic magic concerned with discerning the course of fate and how to effect change, which was done by symbolically weaving new events into being. Odin's knot, like any other form of weaving, is a structure that only makes sense when it is complete, the individual threads or cords are thin and insubstantial, but when brought together as a weaving or in this case an idea, a powerful concept is realised.

However there is another version of Odin's knot, one that fuses together all three triangles as a continuous band, and this represents the fact that differences are an illusion. 

Odin's knot

Borromean Rings also represent the symbol of the Trinity in Christianity, the three interlocking rings signify the divine trinity, which represents the belief that God is of one Being made up of three distinct Persons who exist in co-equal, co-eternal communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  In fact these interlocking rings can be used as symbols for many sets of interlocked triads such as past, present and future.

It is however the Borromean Knot as used by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that I'm going to try and focus on, as it might help me with some sort of structural support when trying to think through the relationship between the world out there and the inner world of embodied mental processes. 

Lacan and the Borromean Knot

The three rings are first of all 'real', in that topology is about solid, three dimensional objects and their surfaces. Therefore when Lacan decides to use it as a symbol, it is a much more solid symbol than a geometric figure, such as a circle or a triangle. 

It is a symbol of an inseparable bond, so that whatever is joined together by this bond is seen as a totality, something that might have three components, but no one component can be free of the other two; if it ever is, it would actually cease to exist in the form it takes. Lacan uses the knot to illustrate his structural theory of three registers or orders of what he thinks of as the psychoanalytic experience or categories of the psyche; the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary. However, he chooses the Borromean Knot, not just because of its interlocking nature but because of the fact that its loops have to be 'real' or three dimensional to work, they have to be loops of chain or rope. This he states, means that rather than simply representing this structure, topology is that structure. 

The knot is not just a way of illustrating the interdependence of the three orders, it is also a structure that helps Lacan to think about what the three orders have in common. Each ring represents one of the orders, and certain elements can be located at intersections of the rings. and these can be used to focus on the relations which bind or link the three aspects of the psychoanalytic experience. He argues that if the knot is broken or unravelled in some way it results in some form of psychosis. There is though a further element in his concept, which he calls the 'sinthome', which he thought of as a fourth ring, a ring that was needed to go beyond the symbolic. I can see why he might need this, and its the problem with theory and representational systems. It's ok to have an idea and to set out a theory, but where is the lived experience, at what point can you get totally lost in the activity and in effect become it? The 'sinthome' it seems to me is not just about a need to have a fourth ring to ensure the three rings hold together, but is a reminder that there is a reality beyond symbolic meaning, and that is for myself a very useful thought. I'm often asked about my work, 'What does it mean?' and by that I gather that people want me to describe its symbolic meaning, but I tend to avoid this, as it can be like a trap, in doing so, it can seem to empty the work of meaning, rather than communicate what its trying to say. 

But Lacan's Borromean Knot has letters and the word 'meaning' inscribed into the various overlapping sections and these are where the detail in terms of his thinking is held. 

Lacan's Borromean Knot

There is a very neat chess metaphor used by Žižek to explain the differences between Lacan's three orders. Žižek explains them like so:

'For Lacan, the reality of human beings is constituted by three intertangled levels: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, ‘knight’ is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way in which different pieces are shaped and characterised by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called ‘messenger’ or ‘runner’ or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances that affect the course of the game: the intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that may disconcert one player or directly cut the game short.'

(Žižek: How to Read Lacan, pp. 8–9)

Žižek returns to this issue in his book, 'Event: Philosophy in Transit' and if you put the two descriptions together you get a reasonable idea of Lacan's three registers.

'For Lacan, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are the three fundamental dimensions in which a human being dwells. The Imaginary dimension is our direct lived experience of reality, but also of our dreams and nightmares — it is the domain of appearing, of how things appear to us. The Symbolic dimension is what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other,’ the invisible order that structures our experience of reality, the complex network of rules and meanings which makes us see what we see the way we see it (and what we don’t see the way we don’t see it). The Real, however, is not simply external reality; it is rather, as Lacan put it, ‘impossible’: something which can neither be directly experienced nor symbolised — like a traumatic encounter of extreme violence which destabilises our entire universe of meaning. As such, the Real can only be discerned in its traces, effects or aftershocks.'

(Žižek 'Event: Philosophy in transit' pp. 119–20)

My personal interest is in this case the fact that for Lacan, direct lived experience of reality is fixed into the 'imaginary' register. 

Right in the centre of Lacan's annotated diagram is the letter 'a'. Small case, and standing as an abbreviation for 'autre', or in English, 'other'. Or is it what Lacan had called 'The Fragile Absolute'

Lacan states that there is a price we all must pay in order to gain access to the social world of other humans. We must undergo a process of finding limits to our natural 'jouissance'. 

'Jouissance' as used by Lacan, has been described as: 'The lost plentitude of one's material bodily drives given up by the subject in order to enter the symbolic order and access the symbolic power of the phallus, something that occurs upon the adoption of language and acceptance of the rules of the name-of-the-father'. 

I.e. There are laws to follow, the first ones of which you learn from your parents. Lacan for some reason called this process 'symbolic castration'. Which sort of makes me have a mental shiver.  You are supposed to have sacrificed an 'enjoyment' that in fact you never really had on the alter of the Symbolic (Law). You sort of 'remember' the prohibition of that enjoyment and resent your Symbolic castration for having had an intuition of something that may not even exist. As far as I can see, this works as a story, a fabrication of the mind, such as the classical Freudian tale of Oedipus, who fulfilled a prophecy that he would end up killing his father and marrying his mother, thereby bringing disaster to his city and family.. The “lost” enjoyment concentrated in the 'objet a' is an impossible enjoyment, hence it is a 'Fragile Absolute'. 

But, and this is where Lacan constructs another tale for us to think about, the lost 'jouissance', that primal something that was lost as you become subject to society and its laws, is the thing around which you construct the subjective story of yourself. This is why we are always wondering what we are and why we are. This awareness of some sort of loss, is what makes us into the desiring subjects we are. the 'a' at the centre, is the lost 'other' that causes us to desire in the first place and this is why Lacan also called it the 'object-cause of desire'. It is the only thing that belongs to all three aspects of the psychoanalytic experience. 

If we then turn to 'JA' which seems to be translated as 'autre jouissance', this it seems is a sort of pure 'jouissance' of the Real beyond any symbolic contamination. This 'escape' is somewhat problematic though as it seems to rely on a very male centred phallocentric idea, in which for some reason, this other is associated with the feminine, therefore this 'jouissance', I would argue, lies outside the ring of the Symbolic, and as far as I can understand his logic, it would then appear that not being male is a form of psychosis.  At another point he mentions a “pure difference” and a “fermenting” Nature, things that stand outside of the sacrificial lack. The important issue in terms of the diagram, is that JA sits outside of the symbolic. Here we can see the problem with words again. When naming things, nouns are either so or not so, they create binary divisions, whilst events are closer to the truth as they are open ended and they evolve. 

The section that is made by the overlap of the real and the symbolic is labelled 'Jφ' φ is the lowercase version of the Greek letter phi Φ.  In Lacan's terminology Jφ stands for 'phallic jouissance'. This means that this concept stands outside of the 'imaginary', it is outside of the domain concerning how things appear to us. Lacan at one point plays with the similar sounds in French of le nom du père (the name of the father), le non du père (the no of the father), to emphasise the legislative and prohibitive functions of the father, and this lies central to why this is a 'phallic jouissance'. The symbolic world that the father introduces the child into is a construct that we have to come to terms with, even if we resent it. Because it is not a part of the imaginary experience it is a 'castrated' enjoyment. 

Meaning is set between the symbolic and the imaginary and sits outside of the real, which is, according to Lacan, inaccessible to psychoanalysis itself. Because of the overlaps between rings, there can be various combinations between the elements. Thus, for example, there can be a symbolic or imaginary hole in the real, for instance a nightmare may leave you with a deeply traumatic aftereffect, a real object may become an icon within the symbolic. Likewise, there can be a consistence or hard core of 'meaning' within the symbolic, or a hole in the imaginary, whereby direct experience is seen as an illusion. The sliding between categories does seem to me to be more akin to how I experience being and when I try to sense my own psyche, its illusiveness and slippery nature is part of its essence, it is something you can't nail down. 

I can intuitively grasp what Lacan is saying, but I think he would have been better at setting it down as a form of poetry or a personal fable rather than as a psychoanalytic conundrum. My own day to day anxiety is I'm sure rooted in my relationship with my father, his harsh rule still impinging on my own ability to trust my instincts, as I still feel myself inwardly seeking his approval before I do anything. Something that I have battled with all my life, and that has at times seemed 'mythic', a something to externalise in order to overcome its hold.

If I had to choose my own geometric figure to represent that movement between the outer and inner worlds that I seem to inhabit it would however be the triquetra.  The triquetra is a triangular figure composed of three interlaced arcs and as you follow them round you realise they are all part of the same figure. Lacan's struggle to unpick the reality that sits outside of perception, from the world of symbols that humans use to give order to their world, is at the end of the day, as far as I can see, a failure, but an interesting one. I am constantly trying myself to find visual structures that give some sort of meaning to my experiences and I do find that those meanings are very illusive and that they have something to do with my inner psyche and my bumping into a something out there, together with the need to resolve the experience of both. 

The triquetra

The representation of three curved forms as a continuous band represents, like Odin's knot, the fact that differences are an illusion. 

Sometimes when I'm awake I think I'm asleep and sometimes when I dream I think I am awake. The topology of dreams is perhaps the next thing to explore. 

See also:

Knots

Lacan and drawing as an external self

Patterning, ties, entanglements and knots

The weaving of grids

The triangle

Lacan and drawing as an external self

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.

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. 

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:

Freud and drawing

Drawing the void 

Tim Ingold's thinking about how the extended mind works

lacanian ink 28

Alan Badiou's original article

For an alternative approach to Lacan try:

BRIAN GROSSKURTH, Drawing on Lacan, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 17, Issue 2, 1994, Pages 138–142, 

Mike Croft with an alternative Lacanian narrative

Mike Croft: Observation of Perception, Part 2

Observation of Perception, Part 2 

When writing this I’m thinking of drawing as a form of visual thinking. By such thinking, I mean considerations of mind, body and cognition variously channelled through the filter of vision. (Philosophically, this could take one in the direction of Embodiment theory.) What makes drawing as visual thinking particular in the context of art and design is intentionality, and it is the latter of which I try to be specific and that registers in and as the result. This said, a lot happens in drawing concerning the relatively autonomous behaviour of the medium that defies one’s intentions, and intentions are not necessarily always recognisable. However, on this occasion I’m trying to show through and as the drawing, ways in which one might observe perception. For this reason I’ve been recording the drawing process and my spoken thoughts while drawing as videos, specifically through an action camera attached to the front of clear plastic goggles worn over my glasses, Figure 1.

Figure 1: To show goggles, inside and outside, and action camera 

both separate from and attached to the goggles. 

This does also make the methodology more sharable, and anyone interested in it might take up the process and adapt it as needed. 
The action cam, however, appears as a thin blurred black rectangle imploded in front of and perpendicular to my vision, Figure 2.

Figure 2: Screenshots from Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing, video clip 26:52 min, 2019. 

This is therefore both a tool to record the drawing process and one of two objects or motifs to observe. While the action-cam itself picks up sound, I record my speech, what I term a voice-over, into a separate audio device. The second tool, also an object or motif, is the goggles. Both of these may be said to operate as tools because, being very close to my face, they’re almost an extension of my eyes. In this sense I’m observing perception, in other words looking at looking. This point is debatably another example of the medium’s defiance, but what I want is a situation where, as nearly as possible, there is nothing in front of my vision. 
The tools, neither of which you the viewer can see in the videos except in the terms that the drawing presents them, are each responsible for a pair of faculties of visual perception. One of the tools is the action cam, with its wide-angle lens, which records visual content both central and peripheral to my vision, without of course distinguishing between either. I provide such distinction through my speech. The other tool is the goggles that register eye and head movement in coordination with the head. (The camera won’t record eye movements made independently of head movements, of which there are two possibilities; eye movements while the head is still, and less often eye movements in different directions to movement of the head.) Both sets of faculties I register as drawn marks and shapes, which provide the accumulative visual/material interest that gradually makes the drawing, Figure 3.

Figure 3: The two stages of the drawing recorded as the video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing and Observation… Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing. Dermatograph pencils, black ink, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 

109 x 79cm. 2019. 

In the first blog entry (link), through reference to the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus’s non-digital eye-scanning device circa 1960s’, and the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon-Battista Alberti’s net or gridded frame to enable the plotting of observed coordinates, I try to explain that to my mind the mediation between perception and observation falls somewhere between the observer and that which is observed. The eye-scanning device is useful in this respect because it shows how one’s eyes scan across space, and Alberti’s frame because it can represent a material mid-way for consideration of life questions; questions of being. By substituting minimal objects, better conceived as tools of perception, for more tangible three-dimensional objects at obviously more distant positions in front of one, then what gets presented on and in the drawing is the mid-way, the mediator of sources of reference that are before it, as nearly as possible extensions of perception itself.
In circumstances where I’m drawing only, without using the action-cam, I have only my glasses to which to refer. If, as in the following example, I still record my speech, it seems appropriate to write at least some of the observations onto and progressively into the drawing, Figure 4.

Figure 4: Drawing of reading glasses drawing viewed from inside the frames while being worn. Dermatograph pencils, coloured inks on white laminated cardboard, 

109 x 79cm. 2019. 

This might also be a key point in general about the experience of drawing: it’s an activity that starts on a surface and gradually, through its development, opens up the surface as space. My own drawing method however, which is mainly concerned with conveying information about its self-same process, does tend to prioritise the surface. 
Explained another way, I’m setting up an inversion of the circumstances whereby the observed object that’s usually positioned somewhere in the space beyond oneself and the drawing is immediately in front of one, in this case the glasses. There is no source of reference that’s logically in front the drawing, and in fact the drawing, that should be the mediator between perception and what’s observed, is further beyond the object in the positions drawer/agent – glasses – drawing, as suggested in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Drawing of reading glasses viewed from inside the frames while being worn + the actual glasses now suspended in front of the drawing to fit their drawn size 

according to distance when seen from behind. 

What’s now interesting about the circumstances so installed is that the actual space between the object, the glasses, and their mediator between perception and observation, the drawing, can be the space of a narrative, a story of whatever else could be taking place in and as a different criterion of perception, Figure 6.

Figure 6: Showing the photo of Figure 5, above, and a view of the actual space existing between glasses and drawing. 

Artists often use the medium of drawing to rehearse and research narratives, or use drawing as the sole medium for this purpose – to name but one example, the contemporary artist William Kentridge. 
This leads me towards another kind of theory, which is the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981). I’d thought of mentioning Lacan in the first blog entry in the context of the glance, but since I reference the glance specifically in the video, Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing (see Figure 3, above), and hadn’t completed that at the time of writing the first entry, it now seems a better moment for further explanation. Lacan’s theorisation of the glance occurs in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). This paper is particularly interesting from the point of view of inter-subjective use of time. While the scenario that provides the context for Lacan’s discussion concerns three human individuals, I’m adapting this to the kind of dialogue that can occur between a drawer/agent and a drawing.
Lacan explains that within the time frame of trying to make a decision or reach a conclusion about something, an initial hypothesis concerning that something is first put to the test of doubt. The period of doubt, which in decision-making need be no more than an instant, but an instant that can be of variable length, is in effect the glance. According to Lacan (2006: 168): ‘The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending’. What I like so much about this quote is the suggestion that the glance concerns uncertainty. The engagement with drawing, or more precisely the dis-engagement with other modes of thought during and as drawing, can be an extended time frame of the glance; the holding of decision-making in abeyance as uncertainty. In the following drawing of the action cam and goggles – from which I also made a video – I later superimposed the glasses, seen as before from the narrow space between my face and the glasses lodged on my nose, Figure 7.

Figure 7: Single-layer state of a drawing of an action-cam worn over goggles and the goggles viewed from the inside while being worn, and a second-layer state of the drawing showing the same drawing with orange glasses superimposed, viewed from inside the frames. Dermatograph pencils, black ink and coloured inks, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 109 x 79cm. 2019.

What’s interesting here is that there’s conceptually a space between the two layers of mark making and cursory imagery that I leave alone. The several apparent positions of the glasses do seem to be increasingly in front of the placements of the narrow band of the action cam, but I mean a conceptual space that’s to do with my lack of conscious concern to integrate the two sets of imagery. However, the two sets waver in a kind of relationship that’s, in a sense, up to them.
While the word uncertainty often has a negative connotation, drawing and other forms of creative practice stand a good chance of manifesting uncertainty positively, no matter what one’s disposition. Debatably, if art works, it’s imbued with affirmation, even if its content and the invested feelings are opposite. Insofar as an uncertain disposition would be to hang back, and a decisive one would be to push onwards – hesitancy versus boldness – I personally like the idea of time conducting a kind of backwards rotation as part of its movement forward, where it picks up the past and draws it through. This also seems like drawing; where each decision is consequential on the next, and the next one is in acknowledgement of some previous decision. There are moments in the video-recordings of the drawing as shown in two states in Figure 3, above, however, where such consequential decisions break down, and in the video particularly of the second state I appear to be searching around for something to do next. While this often happens in drawing, I’d much prefer a drawing to roll on as a continuum of action, Figure 8.

Figure 8: Screenshots 40:42min and 41:27min, with 1st voice-over, and interventions of a 2nd voice-over between the timespan of the two screenshots, of the 44:35min video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing, 2019.

What’s interesting with the strategy of intervening in the first voice-over that’s spoken spontaneously while drawing, is that the intervention is squeezed into available moments of silence where I’m drawing only, which seems like a textual equivalent of re-working and revising the drawing. I show this also, in Figure 8, to indicate how the drawing and the voice-over are mutually both cooperative and distractive.
A second point of Lacanian theory conveniently links the first blog entry’s reference to Alberti’s frame with the idea of a potential narrative space. Lacan adapted the idea of a mid-way in the optical pyramid to his own idea, in the psychical context, of an opaque screen, more like a ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’, that muddies vision, altering and affecting what we assume to be the objectivity of vision. (This is my simple interpretation of very complex theory. For more thorough explanation you might refer for instance to Harari, 2004: 119-40) Suffice it to say that the metaphor of muddied vision may relate to the more subjective aspect of perception: the fact that one often imposes personal interpretation on otherwise objective and sharable visual-material content.
I’m intending to offer this question to a small group of fine art students as a contribution to their seminar class on Embodiment. After a drawing exercise that follows closely in the method of the above-described work, I’ll ask them to define the space that their glasses frame, or the frame of sunglasses, in terms of a narrative of their own choosing. Whether physically in whatever medium in the space as shown in Figure 6, right-hand photo, above, or as further development of the drawing, the only stipulation will be that the drawing should be seen to physically morph into the story. A colleague wrote me a comment on the proposed idea: ‘I see action through big drawing (space), glasses in some way combining a self to a field, which could be expanded space of imagination and place of vision. Physically and symbolically this is interesting, with the use of interpretative words and objects and also the context of subject and thing. I think the content analyses time, space, place, and will involve the students naturally in self related content.’
The idea of framing in one way or another is always important in the more instructive level of creative teaching, and in the above-described project I’ve been doing this for myself. The intention of the drawings is to explore a hypothesis that one can observe perception and visualise it as an observation. As in some instances of drawing – though not all – one hopes that the result conveys a degree of clarity of intentions. However, in the process, things may happen that cause one to become involved in other areas of research. I’ve given some indication of my own interests, and of how things can occur by chance in the course of drawing. If research is an additional direction, then through one’s practice a third and more integral possibility can emerge that alters one’s perspective, but in a sense, because it’s within the work instead of clearly declaring itself, it waits to be discovered. This other integral possibility may shift and challenge one’s determination to achieve clarity.

References 

Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other Press 
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (First published 2002) New York, NY; London: W. W. Norton & Company

Thanks to Mike for a fascinating insight into the work he is doing. 

It might be interesting for you to contextualise Mike's post by reading my own thoughts on that 'uncertain certainty' an attitude that lies at the core of most ventures into trying to record perceptual activity. His glasses are another drawing device or apparatus and therefore it might also be useful for you to think about how these devices have become integral parts of other drawing processes. 

Mike has sent a sharable file for those interested in more detail. He has extracted a 'voice' from one of his videos and given an account of how his spoken interjections are woven into the narrative of drawing making.