Drawing

Friday, 9 August 2024

Venice Biennale 2024: Part one

This year's Venice Art Biennale is entitled 'Foreigners Everywhere' and is a response to the global refugee crisis and the fact that immigration has become a difficult topic for the western world. Many countries now seek to put up boundaries to prevent those in the global south who are facing war and the consequences of climate change, from looking for safe havens in their more 'stable' regions. The fact that many of the western nations have at one time or another used their superior military powers to conquer the areas of the globe that now face climate change at its worst, or are politically unstable as a direct result of western colonial occupation and the arbitrary establishment of boundaries, doesn't seem to matter to many people. I have been told to 'get over it', when raising the issue and that these things are all in the past. But they are still live. Our experience here in Chapeltown, is that there are still consequences linked to post-colonial situations, such as what sorts of jobs people can get, how people think about race, how culture is shaped and who's culture is regarded as the norm.

The works I have selected to ruminate upon are mainly dealing with a drawing led agenda, but due to the multi faceted nature of current art practices; video, photography, soundscapes, mixed media and installation art forms were also very strongly represented within the current biennale exhibitions, I will naturally spread my thoughts out beyond drawing's territory. In particular John Akomfrah's 'Listening all night to the rain', which is this year's British pavilion exhibition, was an extremely moving and powerful work, that used a combination of audio and video projection, to develop a complex narrative of contemporary life in Britain. To experience this, whilst hearing news about far right led riots in English cities, was particularly sobering and I would hope that his exhibition goes on to be shown in UK venues, just as Sonia Boyce's biennale presentation 'Feeling her way', eventually found its way to Leeds.

The first body of work to capture my drawing led attention was that of Evelyn Taocheng Wang, who was channelling the work of Agnus Martin.

Evelyn Taocheng Wang: I Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time (2022–2023)

Wang’s series of paintings 'I Do Not Agree with Agnes Martin All the Time', set up a dialogue that represents how culture morphs and changes over time. Martin was an abstractionist influenced by eastern philosophy and religion. Her work is part of the established canon of western non figurative painting and is often introduced to fine art students as a model of refined sensibility and the need to focus on the nuances of aesthetic difference. However as Wang copies Agnes Martin's work she is herself conflicted and her commentary reflects both the difference in aesthetic attitudes between western and eastern traditions, and her own personal feelings as she tries to reconcile these differences. The refined abstract sensibility of Martin, in now conjoined with the delicate questioning of Wang, the new synthesis echoing the fact that nothing is pure, we are all a mix of influences and hopefully by being aware of this, we can accept difference much more easily and move beyond binary oppositions in our thinking.

The need to become much more accepting of other cultures and ways of thinking is I believe going to become central to our future survival, if not we face a period of war and terrible destruction, that will eventually expand to include all those areas of the world that at the moment see themselves as safe havens.

Strangely after deciding that the work I would be most interested in would be centred on dissolving the boundaries between cultures, the next body of images to capture my attention were those made by Romany Eveleigh. These were works on paper glued to canvas, made in the 1970s and they used the materials, and techniques of writing rather than drawing. She basically repeats the letter “o”, which fills her square support to create irregular bands of faint marks so that from a distance they appear as written texts. This is writing that does not communicate a message and I have reflected on this several times before because of my interest in aesmic writing. It is interesting to compare these images with those of Irma Blank, Eveleigh's images are though more a reminder of the gesture of the writer’s hand. Eveleigh has stated that these images are “not a sought-after end but a sought-for beginning.” Aesmic writing, it is argued, fuses text and image into a unity, thus setting them both free to an audience's subjective interpretations, but perhaps because also on exhibition in the Giardini was the work of an artist who wanted to show how drawing ability had been used in the past to discriminate and separate out foreign elements from society, I was reminded of the false claims of graphologists, who argued that they could tell a person's character and moral disposition from the shape of their handwriting.

Romany Eveleigh

Joyce Joumaa's work, 'Memory contours' reflects on the eugenics movement's influence on past immigration policy and practice in the United States of America. She has investigated the drawing led intelligence tests designed to identify mental deficiency; tests that often led to the detention and deportation of people who failed them. One test that was often given to people landing in Ellis Island New York, was to draw shapes from memory. The test demonstrates how drawing can be both gestural expression and instrumentalised as a sign of intelligence and mental health. The Nazi party in Germany were very quick to pick up on the implications of these types of tests and used examples of expressionist painting, which was itself an attempt to portray emotion, as illustrations of mental depravity.

Joyce Joumaa

Joumaa has made videos of people trying to replicate the four drawings shown in the upper image, thus heightening the tension. How well will the person drawing be able to replicate what they have seen? The installation reminds us that observational drawing ability is a product of training and is not an innate skill. Training is also culturally specific and a well trained artist in one tradition, will find their skills not valued in another. It was interesting to see that a collective of Māori artists won the Golden Lion prize for 'Takapau', a large-scale installation inspired by traditional woven mats. An intricate canopy had been woven from reflective trucking straps, echoing the shape of traditional takapau; the finely woven mats made for special events.

Māori artists collective: Takapau

Māori artists are trained in takapau mat construction, the particular abstract forms signifying various aspects of Māori culture. This training is as important to a Māori artist as life drawing was to a French academy painter from the 19th century. One society's culture will always be foreign to another's; imagine a situation whereby a Māori set test was given to Europeans, whereby they had to make designs using traditional Māori forms, after having just a quick glance of a takapau mat.

It is at this point that an idea of releasing images from their past context begin to become more and more important to me, and I presume this is what led Lina Bo Bardi to design her alternative presentation method. She is another person I have looked at before in connection with my posts looking at framing work. The clear glass system does help us to see what lies behind the images that we normally only look at the front of. The old fading stuck on notes about past exhibitions, or sales are always fascinating, as well as the various ways that the images' supports have been made. There was though an issue and that was how poorly sighted people were managing to negotiate these glass panels. perhaps the same effect could have been achieved by sinking the images into a thin wall, so that you could see both sides without having to negotiate the 'invisible' glass holding structure. The glass panel presentation systems were designed by Bo Bardi and first exhibited at the opening of the Sao Paulo museum of Art in 1968. They were designed to ‘resurface’ art objects dating from classical history up to the present by “floating” them in glass panels anchored by a concrete block. She stated, “My intention has been to destroy the aura surrounding museums.” She wanted to disrupt the contemplation of works hanging on white walls, and destroy the hierarchies set up between artists and artistic periods, undoing the sacralisation of the museum experience. Of course her glass easels were now exhibited with all the aura of the art and artists that she wanted to get past. This valorisation is something that is part and parcel of contemporary western art culture; the art gallery is used as a frame to give value to the work, even if it is meant as a statement about art not having monetary value; a paradox that I don't think will be overcome until art is returned to its function as a day to day reality, as opposed to something special and therefore metaphorically protected by the walls of the Venice Arsenale.

Lina Bo Bardi 'floating' presentation system

The exhibition as a whole did though raise questions about western aesthetic values and what role an artist has in a world that is both global and constructed from a fantastic mix of cultures; some with traditions going back thousands of years and others with newly minted traditions, that have come about as fusions between the many disparate peoples that now inhabit dense city environments. Whether or not an art exhibition, no matter how big, can have any impact on what is actually going on in our towns and cities is debatable, but it is hard to track down consequences of experience, and someone with or without power and influence, might just see something here that will trigger them to make a decision, and that decision may set off something, like that butterfly in the Amazon jungle that flaps its wings one day, and as a consequence eventually a storm blows over New York.

I shall, as I have in other years in response to earlier visits, reflect on my visit over the next few weeks, there is so much to see that it takes me time to digest it all.

See also:

Lina Bo Bardi

Venice an allegory

Colour and control

Saturday, 3 August 2024

Thingamajigs

Thingamajigs, by Daniel and Emily Kimbell

The last time I was visiting my grandchildren, I came across a comic strip they were looking at called 'Thingamajigs' by Daniel and Emily Kimbell. The strip appears in 'The Phoenix' comic and in it characters are animated versions of everyday objects.

From: 'Thingamajigs'

I was fascinated to read a comic whereby my thoughts on animist practices were being played out as children's entertainment. The use of anthropomorphism, the act of attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things, such as animals or inanimate objects, is an old one, and it has been revived for each generation in slightly different ways.

The Thingamajigs' comic strip

In my day I first encountered human attributes in non human form in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', which was already over 10 years old by the time I first saw it in the 1950s.

From 'Fantasia'

In the scene above a flower becomes a swirling ballet dancer, spot-lit in the dark as if on stage. Also in Walt Disney's 'Fantasia', Micky Mouse, another product of anthropomorphism, is seen in action as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a 20th century version of an 18th century tale.

From: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

In the animated cartoon, Micky is seen giving life to a cleaning brush, that he then directs to carry buckets of water for him. The film was in turn based on a poem by Goethe, written in 1797. The poem tells the tale of an old sorcerer leaving his apprentice with cleaning chores to do. Tired of fetching water in buckets, the apprentice then enchants a broom to do the work for him, using magic that he cant really control. The apprentice soon realises he cannot stop the broom because he does not know the right spell with which to stop it. The apprentice tries to stop the broom by attacking it with an axe, but each piece chopped off then becomes a whole new broom that takes up a pail and continues fetching water, but now at twice the speed. The entire room then begins to flood, but when all seems lost, the old sorcerer returns and quickly breaks the spell. This story is in turn based on one written 2,000 years earlier by Lucian. In the story, 'Philopseudḗs', literally, 'Lover of lies', the narrator, Tychiades, visits the house of a sick and elderly friend, Eucrates, where he has an argument about the reality of the supernatural. Eucrates and several other visitors tell various tales, intended to convince him that supernatural phenomena are real. Each story in turn is either rebutted or ridiculed by Tychiades. In this Greek version, the sorcerer is an Egyptian mystic and Eucrates his companion has learnt the spell for animating the inanimate by eavesdropping, but the basic structure of the story is the same.

This magic is concerned with the transfer or release of 'Élan vital', the vital life that Bergson argued was within all things not just the biologically active. The Animation Spell is in many fictional stories, a spell that enables sorcerers and sorceresses to bring any object to life.

Another story from my childhood whereby things were given human attributes was the fable of the North wind and the sun. This was one of Aesop's Fables, whereby persuasion triumphs over force. In the fable the sun and the wind argue over who can get the coat off a young man, the wind of course tries to blow it off, but the young man simply wraps it closer and closer around himself the harder and harder the wind blows. The sun and the wind cannot begin to argue with each other, unless we give them the power to do this, and I in turn would argue, as we do this, we release the mystical power of anthropomorphism.

The sun raises the temperature and the boy takes his coat off

We are social beings, and therefore we spend a lot of time building up connections between other people. This quality depends on trusting that others might in many ways act and think in a similar way to ourselves. But we do have to 'trust' in others, as we have no way of knowing what goes on inside other people's heads. This 'trust' can also lead to the anthropomorphising of non-humans. Just as we assume that other people are going to join in with us in the game of life, we can also have a belief that non humans might be able to operate in the same way. We give our pets internal voices, we talk to them as if we expect them to understand what we are saying. We also do this with inanimate objects; we implore our car to keep going, even though we know it can't hear us; we put trust in old tools and talk to them as if we were working with a dear friend. We attribute human-like qualities to inanimate objects, animals as well as our environments and the wider landscapes we inhabit. This can help us feel as if we are better able to understand and relate to the world around us. We are in effect always trying to socialise our experience, because being alone and unconnected to others is for a social animal a terrible thing. This way of understanding the world is something other social animals also possess. Young chimpanzees often carry around sticks and seem to play with them as if the sticks were other small chimps. This stick-carrying is a playful expression of cognitive abilities found in both chimps and humans, but in order for it to be meaningful there needs to be a capacity for imagination, or forming a mental image that is not real but which nevertheless represents reality. Anthropomorphising may be something that improves our wellbeing by creating a sense of connectedness.

The Pont des Arts that stretches over the Seine in Paris has long being used for lovers' pledges made in the form of locks. It was here that attaching padlocks became synonymous with everlasting affection. It is as if the locks can lock in or hold onto the love between people.

So many locks were attached to the bridge that eventually their weight brought a section down

The bridge is a testimony to the power of our ability to invest human meaning into objects and place externalised thoughts into inanimate things. It is now a very common ritual for couples from all over the world to declare their undying affection for one another by placing their initials on a padlock, fastening it to something and throwing the key away.

The practice has now entered the attentions of academia and it has been thoroughly researched and its history documented. An article in the Journal of Material Culture has traced the practice to a particular source.

'It was not until the 2000s that the structural deposition of a padlock took on widespread romantic significance. The likeliest trigger was an Italian teenage romance novel: Federico Moccia’s (2006) Ho Voglia di Te (I Want You), a sequel to Tre Metri sopra il Cielo (Three Metres above the Sky), in which characters attach a padlock to a chain on the Ponte Milvio, Rome. ‘This is “the lover’s chain”’, explains Gin, the main female character. ‘You have to put a padlock on this chain, lock it and throw the key in the Tevere.’ ‘And then?’, Step, the male protagonist, asks. ‘You never break up.’1 Step obligingly attaches a padlock and deposits the key into the Tiber. The phenomenal success of these novels and subsequent films, in Italy and Spain, led to Moccia’s (primarily teenage) fans imitating the custom, in a form of imaginative play that sparked a transition from popular culture to popular custom. By 2007, an assemblage of love-locks was fully flourishing on the Ponte Milvio, and tourists so readily adopted the practice that it became predominantly a tourist practice (Houlbrook, 2021).

From: Houlbrook, C. and Parker, A. (2020) Finding love: The materialities of love-locks and geocaches: The Journal of Material Culture: September: Volume 26 Issue 1

It is interesting therefore to find the same type of locks attached to contemporary Voodoo figures and African fetishes.

Mpungu figure. The Tervuren Museum

A contemporary ritual figure recently found being used in the Zaïre area, is locally called a mpungu, and is used by a nkanu or spirit worker to ward off evil forces. The object was collected recently from the frontier region between Lower Zaïre and Bandundu, near Angola. Padlocks accompany cloth, iron, cowries, herbs and mirrors. The figure was used to protect its owner from spells, curses or other maledictions. The padlocks and knots being symbolic barriers, barring all psychic routes to the owner and diverting or confusing the enemy.

In both cases, whether affirmations of love or ritual protection, inanimate objects are invested with psychic agency. Proof for myself that the making of art is somehow deeply interconnected to our need to use inanimate objects as intermediaries between the everyday and an invisible spiritual world.

Votive objects designed to deflect pain

From: Immaterial Disarray

The (im)Material Disarray exhibition gave me an opportunity to develop these ideas more fully and for the first time I was consciously trying to make objects that were animist in intent. These concerns were then developed further in the short story, 'Nest'.

An earlier post on why I have been making animist images focused on my use of a boyhood relationship with a Sooty puppet, but I'm now concerned to find more universal forms that can have a similar agency, so have been looking at ancient religious forms, especially those associated with 'magic'. For instance, the ancient Mesopotamians performed magical rituals to purify themselves of sins committed unknowingly. One such ritual was known as the Šurpu or "Burning", in which the caster of the spell would transfer the guilt for all their misdeeds into various objects such as a strip of dates, an onion or a tuft of wool. The person would then burn the objects and thereby purify themselves of all the sins that they might have unknowingly committed. It is the transfer of sins into inanimate objects, and the fact that once externalised they can be removed, that fascinates me and helps in the shaping of the wellbeing potential of the objects I have been making.

Ritual objects based on scorpions from pre dynastic Egypt

The objects above were used to help overcome pain. Because a scorpion had a sting in the tail, it could symbolise pain. It could also be used as part of a sympathetic magic ritual. The objects I have made allude to this, but I have also upped the intensity of the colour, making it 'more painful'.

'Thingamajigs' is a word that sits in my mind not that far away from the word 'tranculments'. Tranculments are things that we collect around us, like ornaments and the bric a brac that sort of mounts up gradually around the house, things that sit on top of furniture, that cluster around shelves and is a Black Country word from my youth, a word I got to know because we had a lot of tranculments in our house. We had horse brasses, ceramic Goss crested ware that consisted of souvenirs from seaside towns we had been to, Wade models of tiny dogs, Capodimonte figures and similar sorts of things such as framed sets of cigarette cards.

Horse brasses

Goss Crested Ware

Wade figurines

Capodimonte

Cigarette Card

I now find these things full of psychic energy and if I come across them in junk shops they talk to me with Black Country accented whispers. I now associate these things with my long dead parents, who collected them I believed at the time, as some sort of protection from the reality of life.

Perhaps my then intuition was not too far away from the truth. Perhaps these objects did have some sort of magical aura that blessed the house and protected those within it from harm. I spent many hours cleaning them, ritually laying them out on newspaper sheets on a Sunday morning and washing and polishing them so that they never became drab or dusty. Originally horse brasses had been used as charms or amulets to ward off evil and to bring good luck. In my parents' house they were hung on walls instead of on horses, but something of their original purpose somehow remained and worked to ward off evil, whatever that might consist of. When I was designing charms, I had these sorts of things in the back of my mind, the design below of a charm to ward off foot pain, is in effect similar to a horse brass.

Metal low relief foot charm used to ward off bunion pain

Garry Barker exhibition

(Im)material disarray exhibition

Why I'm making animist images

Wearable objects and curative things

Monday, 29 July 2024

Katja Heitmann and Embodied Memory

Notebook page: The movement archivist trying to retrieve someone.

I recently went to a workshop at Yorkshire Dance led by the choreographer Katja Heitmann. Since 2019, she has been building an archive for human movement: Motus Mori. Working with what she calls movement-archivists, people that I would call observational dancers, (similar to observational drawers), she collects and preserves movements from people of all ages, bodies and backgrounds. From these observations Katja creates new artworks.

For instance in her work COMMUNITAS, she states, '16 performers aged between 20 and 75 exchange their personal movements amid everyday reality. They support and follow each other’s movements until a collective body emerges. COMMUNITAS brings together 6 self-taught movers and 10 academic dance students from Fontys Academy of Arts, in a moving theatrical ritual. Accompanied by bubbles of spatial sound, they form ritual islands of focus and devotion'.

I was very impressed with her work on embodied memory, and in the workshop I became very aware of how each and every body is a record of its own history; the way we walk, sit, stand etc. each movement of our bodies telling stories, as well as expressing emotion. The workshop also focused on how memories are triggered by physical movement and during the lecture/performance, Katja Heitmann worked with a German dancer who had been operating as a body archivist. As she shared findings from her research around body memory and dementia, she asked this dancer to illustrate what she was referring to.

The dancer sits in the style of a remembered person

I had taken a sketchbook, so was able to do a little drawing between the sessions where the audience was invited to perform. The drawings didn't amount to much, but the work done with our bodies did. We were for instance introduced to the different ways that certain people walk. The professional archival dancer, was asked by Heitmann to remember particular individuals and then to concentrate on how they walked. He would then physically seem to reshape himself and go into the body form of each remembered person, which was an amazing thing to watch, as his neck lowered or straightened, his torso twisted or lent over and his whole body changed. But then he would walk. We would watch and follow. Some people stride heel first, some are flat footed, others raise their knees, some make short chopped movements, others almost skip, some feet splay outwards, some knees touch, some legs bow, whilst some walkers have toes that point to an invisible line passing underfoot. We also explored how each person sits, how we hold our hands when at rest, and how we rise as we stand. We have all developed unique, bespoke body movements and these movements are the language of our embodied being.

I was gripped by the workshop and wanted it to go on and on, and once it had finished began to ruminate on how all this new information could be processed and brought into the work I have been doing in relation to interoception and the visualisation of embodied thinking. What was so refreshing about Heitmann's work was that it eliminated poor translation technologies. She didn't trust photographs as a body archive technology as they were flat static things, she similarly didn't trust video footage as it was also disembodied and written descriptions were similarly faint echoes of the body's reality. Drawing I felt at least captured traces of a moving hand, but I could see what she was getting at, only another body could truthfully and accurately archive the embodied reality of human beings.

Notebook pages

I felt I was being taught a lesson. She was right in stressing the limitations of other media as body archive technologies, and it made me think about what I was doing. I am I hope still doing something useful, but it is not archiving how we think and experience our lived reality. My work is to open out the imaginative and poetic potential of experience and its visualisation, rather than to capture the outward visual experience of it. I am not an observational documenter of the world, I am a visual explorer who seeks to tap into the possibilities that sit underneath observations of perceived reality.

The imagined interior begins to bleed into an external reality

Drawing and dance

Is drawing a language?

Drawing as translation

Documentation and drawing practices

Wednesday, 24 July 2024

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