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| ISBN-13: | 9780822392927 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/09/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Sales rank: | 752,095 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Homay King is Associate Professor of Art History at Bryn Mawr College.
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LOST IN TRANSLATION
Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic SignifierBy Homay King
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4759-0
Chapter One
Even when we think we are creating, we are always being worked by foreign messages. -JEAN LAPLANCHE, "The Kent Seminar"
THE ENIGMATIC SIGNIFIER
Jean Laplanche overs a psychoanalytic theory with a diverence. That diverence is his insistence on an alterity inscribed at the very heart of subjectivity and on the absolute primacy of concrete, particular other human beings in the implantation of this alterity and the constitution of the self. In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Laplanche provides a rereading of Freud's theory of primal repression and the formation of the unconscious. For Laplanche, the unconscious is a repository not of taboo desires or repressed memories but rather of signifiers that are provered to an infant subject by adults. Like a traveler with only rudimentary language skills, Laplanche's developmental allegory goes, the infant simply fails to comprehend these signs. Laplanche calls these messages "enigmatic signifiers" in adapting and expanding upon a phrase first used by Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud." A smile, a caress, a string of babble-all of these can assume the role of enigmatic signifiers because the infant is of necessity at least partially in the dark about their meaning, intention, and affective tone. A touch may be both loving and brusque; a sigh may express contentment or irritation.
Laplanche notes that he uses "enigma" (in French, l'énigme) to translate Freud's German word Rätsel, which can also be translated as "riddle." As Laplanche notes, though, this German word refers to something more than a "simple riddle" or puzzle, which in the French he calls une devinette. Unlike a simple riddle, Laplanche tells us, an enigma "can only be proposed by someone who does not master the answer." This is why an enigma divers from a mystery (mystère); the latter presumes a theological subject who holds the answer. Unlike a riddle, to which there is a correct answer or solution if only one can reason it out, and unlike a mystery, which lacks a specific answer but does have an explanation in the theological or supernatural realm, the Laplanchean enigma has no answer at all.
These signifiers are thus doubly enigmatic. Not only does the infant lack the resources to decode them, but also they are permeated with meanings of which even their senders are unaware (Laplanche calls the messages "opaque to recipient and transmitter alike"). No one, not even the most responsible parent, can retain absolute control over the multiple possible meanings that gestures or sounds may express or over the way that a child will receive her utterances. As Laplanche writes, "The adult world is entirely infiltrated with unconscious and sexual significations to which the adults themselves do not possess the code." These signifiers produce "remainders" in the unconscious, bits that are irremediably lost in translation, and they are passed in some form from generation to generation. They are neither tied to anatomy or gender nor depend on any particular structure of kinship. Rather, they are present for any subject who has ever been addressed by an other and been cognizant of the fact of being addressed, yet unsure about the precise sense of the message. Despite the universality of this experience, these signifiers are particular because they vary according to the circumstances and individuals involved in each address. The arrival of the enigmatic signifier is a foundational moment, a primal seduction that inaugurates sexuality and desire. As John Fletcher explains, "The relation to the other and his or her encrypted desire and its possible meanings is inscribed in the very constitution of human subjectivity." This inaugural moment does not happen once and for all, and neither is its trauma fully bound once the infant subject has improved her verbal comprehension or honed her ability to read body language. Rather, these enigmatic signifiers will become what Laplanche calls "source objects" of the drive. They continue to exert a pull from the unconscious throughout the course of the subject's life, thereby perpetually inviting the subject to translate and understand them. As Cathy Caruth has suggested in her studies of trauma, Laplanchean subjectivity is constituted by and through a trauma of not knowing: enigmatic signification reflects that which "resists simple comprehension ... what it is, in traumatic events, that is not precisely grasped." The traumatic originary scenario furthermore can be repeated or retriggered throughout the subject's life at any time that she receives an ambiguous message from someone else.
THE UNFINISHED COPERNICAN REVOLUTION Once upon a Time
I turn now to a work of contemporary art that is in many ways completely unlike the others that I will discuss in this book and yet is compelling for its illustration of an archetypal scenario of enigmatic signification. Once upon a Time (2002), an extraordinary installation by the British artist Steve McQueen, creates a kind of laboratory scenario for its viewers, an enactment of the transmission of an alien, ambiguous message. The piece consists of a series of 116 still photographs that are projected in sequence onto a large wall. They form a curiously ranging collection of images, strange in their selection but familiar or even banal in content: children gathered around a globe in a classroom, an illustration of the molecular structure of water with the label "[H.sub.2]O," a man with sun-burned hands eating grapes, diagrams showing international units of measurement and their conversion factors, a woman shopping in a supermarket, a smiling family seated at a dinner table, a photograph of the United Nations building in New York, and so on. The still images are edited together with slow, lingering dissolves, and the film stock is slightly grainy and a bit muted in color. The soundtrack consists of voices speaking what seems at first to be a hodgepodge of many languages. Although one strains to understand the voices, they are rich in affective tone and rhythm and they occasionally accelerate or reach a crescendo as if expressing something of great urgency. The glow of the images and the gentle dissolves between them create a soothing sensation. The darkness of the room and the vast amount of space they take up on the wall are suggestive of the cinema. The large scale auraticizes the images, thereby creating an almost religious or cosmic effect. It is as if the viewer is a guest at a planetarium or a tourist gazing up at a giant display at a natural history museum. Although the words on the soundtrack are opaque, the pairing of silent images with nondiegetic sound evokes the conventions of documentary film-in particular, the educational science or ethnographic program. The effect is hypnotic; the combination of the large-scale projected images and the lulling, unintelligible sounds seem almost to reproduce the scenario of primal seduction.
Initially, the viewer is at a loss to make sense of the images, and the soundtrack does nothing to clarify why the particular pictures have been chosen, how they relate to one another, or what they aim to communicate. However, the viewer who has read the publicity information accompanying the exhibit will know that the images are in fact culled from those stowed on the Voyager II space probe that NASA sent into space in 1977, which still roams the universe thirty years later and now claims the title of the human-made object that is most distant from the earth. Originally assembled with the help of the seti project (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), chaired by Carl Sagan, the images belong to a collection referred to as the Golden Record. The collection consists of pictures, verbal greetings written in various languages, and audio samples of "sounds of earth," all recorded on a gold-plated record for inclusion in the probe and addressed to any intelligent life-form that might happen to find them. Their aim was indeed ethnographic, of humanity as a whole. As a greeting from President Jimmy Carter recorded on the disc says, "This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings ... We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe."
The content of the soundtrack of McQueen's installation is also explained in the literature accompanying the installation: it is glossolalia, voices speaking in tongues. If we have attempted in vain to understand it, that is because it is untranslatable. The glossolalia might additionally alert us to the fact that the images, too, are addressed to an alien audience that presumably lacks whatever dictionary might be required to decipher them. Like Laplanche's adult parent who speaks in affectively charged babble to an infant who initially has no way to understand its content or intention, so NASA projects its collection of images and sounds out to an interstellar audience composed of members who are likewise newcomers to humanity. In turn, McQueen projects these same images and unintelligible sounds out to an unknown audience of museum goers. In this way his installation-like any work of art whose meaning is not immediately transparent-places spectators in the position of being the recipient-decoders of an enigmatic signifier.
In "The Unfinished Copernican Revolution," Laplanche refers to a similar "message in a bottle" that was planted on the rocket ship Pioneer 10 in 1972. Laplanche uses this example to draw a distinction between two aspects of signification, both of which go beyond the notion of decoding a sign's meaning or referent: "Whatever the fabric of this message and the inventiveness shown by its authors, all the difference resides-if we place ourselves on the side of the receiver-between, on the one hand, finding a rocket and detecting in its construction the indices of the presence of intelligent beings and, on the other, receiving signifiers which, without presupposing any shared code or interpretive rule, testify to the intention to communicate and, perhaps, to conscious and even unconscious reasons for such an intention." Laplanche makes the important observation that the rocket itself already testifies to the presence of intelligence of some kind: it is an artifact, an index in Charles Peirce's terms, that indicates the presence of someone or something that had the capacity to produce it. But as Laplanche implies, there is a sense in which the inclusion of a message is redundant, for an alien being endowed with deductive capabilities similar to our own-ignoring, as NASA did, the relative likeliness or absurdity of this premise-could infer many of the scientific principles offered therein simply by taking apart the rocket. The inclusion of a message thus testifies to something beyond the simple presence of a technologically advanced life-form. It reveals a desire to communicate and the fact of the existence of a system of signs for so doing. Referencing Lacan, Laplanche invokes the image of "hieroglyphs in the desert" or "cuneiform characters carved on a tablet of stone": we know they intend to signify something to us, but we cannot necessarily ascribe a signified to them. Laplanche optimistically suggests that such signs might reveal not only the desire to communicate but also something about the whys and hows of this desire. Something might get across, in other words, about the senders' hopes and anxieties, their assumptions regarding the addressee, and so on. "I hope that you will be impressed by my people's accomplishments," or "I assume you are just as curious about me as I am about you" are possible such meanings; "I am trusting that you will not use this information to destroy me" might be another.
This, Laplanche tells us, is the function of the enigmatic signifier. The Laplanchean subject, like our hypothetical alien, is implicitly invited to decode not only the informational meanings in the message-the principles of mathematics and chemistry, the existence of complex societies, and so on-but also the affective and intersubjective ones. What does the one who offers this message want from me? Is there an ulterior motive, a catch? How am I expected to reply? This is what makes the enigmatic signifier inherently traumatic and sexual for Laplanche: the fact that a solicitation is involved, one that implicates my desire, and that this solicitation is fundamentally ambiguous (for both parties, no less). As Laplanche repeatedly reminds us, the enigma is "a seduction": etymologically a leading astray, similar to what Lacan calls a "lure" in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. This address furthermore raises deep-seated questions about how one is to relate to another person. In its very failure to communicate, the enigma ends up signifying the impossibility of ever completely knowing what another person is thinking, feeling, or desiring in relation to oneself (if not the impossibility of relationality tout court).
The Laplanchean subject is thus, needless to say, not an especially happy one. As Laplanche notes, the enigmatic signifier is "conflict-full, conflictual." The subject whose desire is constituted through and in relation to this signifier may become obsessed with decoding the desire of the other. In ventriloquizing Freud's infamous question, "What does woman want?" Laplanche suggests that the result of this wondering is that "woman" is unfortunately positioned as "forever mysterious, strange, and therefore apparently hostile." Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit provide an astute gloss upon this aspect of the Laplanchean subject in their book Caravaggio's Secrets, and they help us to understand its consequences. They suggest that the Laplanchean subject may harbor "a tendency (operating in varying degrees) to structure relations on the basis of an eroticizing mystification." In a world where desire is inaugurated by the enigma, that is, one may find oneself drawn to relationships modeled upon dynamics of secrecy and probing, withholding and pursuit, confusion and surprise. The other is fascinating, for he or she is presumed to know something that would affirm or deny one's desires and one's sense of self. However, this other is also distressing or even infuriating because he or she fails to deliver up this knowledge. In such situations, Bersani and Dutoit add, it "becomes reasonable to confront the world with paranoid mistrust."
Fascinatingly, Bersani and Dutoit link the paranoid aspect of Laplanchean desire to the quest for knowledge and the desire for epistemological mastery. They observe that in Western civilization-"at least since Oedipus"-the riddle of the enigmatic signifier has dominated the pursuit of knowledge and, moreover, "has been fantasized as provisional." The prospect of cracking an enigma, any enigma, is surely a tantalizing one for most of us. However, the idea that one might completely undo the enigmatic signifier or decrypt the other's desire is precisely a fantasy. Classical cinema overs us many familiar examples of this understanding of desire as an epistemological problem: the femme fatale is both sexy and threatening because her desire is utterly baffling (as in Vidor's Gilda); the uncommunicative lothario becomes yet more attractive but also frightening because he seems to know something that we do not (as in Hitchcock's Suspicion). It is only logical to respond to this situation with distrust of others, or even paranoia. This paranoid response can ultimately take violent forms: the fantasy that the enigma can be fully shaken forth from the other lies behind the most relentless forms of interrogation. To take another example from film noir, one might consider the well-known scene in Chinatown where Jake Gittes slaps Evelyn Mulwray in order to shake forth her secret.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from LOST IN TRANSLATION by Homay King Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. The Enigmatic Signifier
2. The Shanghai Gesture
3. The Chinatown Syndrome
4. The Great Wall
5. The Lost Girls
Notes
Bibliography
Index