A conversation between psychoanalyst and philosopher Alexander Smulyanskiy (Александр Смулянский) and philosopher and co-founder of the project TZVETNIK Natalya Serkova (Наталья Серкова). Topics such as the inadequacy of direct action, the deferral of satisfaction, and the enunciation in the artistic realm were discussed.

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Natalya Serkova: In the field of art, a rather curious trend can currently be observed: artists and curators actively refuse clearly articulated public enunciations, as if they consciously do not want to take any particular aesthetic and, more broadly, political stance. Instead, we get complete silence or a lengthy, semi-artistic text, which seems to be called upon to cover the tracks even better, from the curator or the artist himself. I am talking specifically about the so-called emerging art[i], art that has not yet gone through the process of institutional legitimation. Its authors seem to counterpose their own way of creating to the institutionalized manner of producing art, the latter consisting of a constant attempt to solve certain problems and thereby fix the existing reality. In your view, what does the emergence of this novel artistic enunciation indicate?

Alexander Smulyanskiy: As I see it, it is significant that in the field of discussions about art, we inevitably find ourselves in the realm of problems and concepts formed by the philosophy and publicism of the 19th century. This circumstance is often taken into consideration, calling for a change in language and method. But the fact that this demand does not resolve the problem indicates the presence of some essential obstacle. It is obvious that the latter is more powerful than all the deconstructivist measures taken about it, for the subject who produces or receives art will inevitably conceive of it in terms of gesture, act, creation, reality, milieu, and other respective concepts found in the post-Hegelian domain.

In this regard, if not for art itself, then at least for commentary dedicated to it, there are not many chances to go beyond this limit: if the artist makes a radical gesture, more actively intervenes in the situation, we, even carefully avoiding clichés, inevitably think of it as an intrusion into the territory of “reality,” as a certain exacerbation of the question about the relationship between reality and art. If the artistic enunciation’s meaning is unclear, if it is deliberately positioned so it remains unclear, in this case, we might talk about evasion, avoidance, and refusal—and the inertia of language that arises here inevitably pushes us to talk about escapism, that is, about postponing the question of the impact of art. All of this is a consequence of the conviction that art and the place of its realization are necessarily related, and it is thought that this relation, no matter behind what descriptions it hides, is ultimately unequivocal. This unequivocalness cannot be removed by the sum of implications, meanings, and interpretations that can be extracted from the artwork: either you intervene by employing the latter or not.

However, there are ways to suspend our dependence on such judgments. Two years ago, I spoke at a conference dedicated to performance art as a form of presence. The topic of the event itself suggested that the question of “reality”—even if carefully cleansed of purely metaphysical underpinnings and, in particular, of the unambiguous opposition of the concept of reality to that of illusion—would be particularly demanding and unavoidable. Therefore, in my presentation, I used the psychoanalytic apparatus, which has a special tradition of dealing with the concept of reality, having nothing to do with the philosophical tradition under whose influence we think today. In particular, I resorted to the concept of the symptom. The discussion was not about pathological phenomena but about the workings of the fantasm in the artistic field. Firstly, I insisted that “reality” in art is not the external environment but the Other, not in the ethical-Levinasian, but in a more specific psychoanalytic sense, which implies that the Other is a field of impact where one’s actions can provoke either enjoyment (jouissance) or anxiety (anxiété). Accordingly, to describe the functioning of art, I proposed two symptomatic models. In particular, I defined the actionist type of aesthetic activity as hysterical. This makes us stop talking about it in such terms as “responsible position” or “protest”—not because the hysterical symptom does not involve these things, but because they are only a consequence of a particularly organized fantasm of solidarity that has nothing to do with the pragmatism of political solidarity which fights oppression. The hysterical symptom seeks solidarity, addressing the issue of lack and suffering not of the oppressed but of the Master. This is a disillusioning fact of contemporaneity, which has to be taken into account nevertheless.

Another type of art, going in other directions and groping the category of reality differently, is also very popular today. It takes the form of documentation, fragmentation of events, a focus on “daily life” without “big ideas” (examples of such art are documentary filmmaking that rejects montage, doc theater, recording everyday life as opposed to “big historical events,” etc.), all of which I attributed to the perverse mode of display. From this point of view, both the young art you want to discuss and the institutional trend you oppose it to perfectly fit into my proposed nosology. We no longer need to talk about “intervention” or, on the contrary, “avoidance,” because we are dealing with two different ways of symptomatizing that are not necessarily in opposition. The direction of art you are talking about is curious in that it shows a kind of historical failure of contemporary institutionalized art, which, technically, attempts to expand the means used to make a direct impact, while ethically, is concerned with the correction of social reality. To the forefront returns the perverse fantasm, which historically was realized much earlier than the hysteric one. What is seen in such art as a rejection of position is, in fact, the establishment of more than certain relations with the object, in particular, with the object of the scopic drive, which is well traced in the artistic direction you mentioned in your question. The political consequences of such art are located precisely in the sphere of the drive.

Indeed, the objects produced by the art I am talking about often possess a very high degree of attractiveness, which art that “criticizes everything that exists” consciously and systematically avoids. Thus, both ethically and aesthetically, this art literally incarnates the idea of perversion: on an ethical level, it welcomes all kinds of deviation, as if nodding towards the post-anthropocentric, post-humanistic theoretical developments; in the case of aesthetics, it includes in its orbit all that is “strange” (the weird[ii] new philosophies), ugly, maimed, and repulsive. What is the perverse fantasm concerning art, and how is its rejection of direct action and lucid, unambiguous enunciation resolved within it? 

Some clarification is needed here because the term perversion is fraught with references to something piquant and undermining all foundations. Whereas from my perspective, it is precisely in the aesthetic field that the perverse position should be stripped of its transgressive meaning, which constantly offers itself, because in art, this position is not only not even close to anything scandalous, but rather, in practice, is embodied in works of art that require from the viewer heightened patience and increased preparedness to defer gratification. For example, an extended shot or an emphasis on documentary elements in filmmaking is perverse regardless of how well the displayed material meets the standards of decency. The extent to which the viewer can derive satisfaction from such a sight in no way depends on his personal perverse fantasm.

Here, it would be legitimate to ask what allows us to define this aesthetic mode as perverse if, at the level of content, it does not refer to anything deviant, imbued with eroticism. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the perverse position is defined as a special proximity to the object, which is capable of replacing and presenting other desired objects. This universal substituting object in psychoanalysis is called the object cause of desire. In this sense, the perverse mode is distinguished by its ability to point to this object, to highlight and formalize its role in the situation, including the most remote consequences of its presence. Looking at it psychoanalytically, perversion is what is in the most immediate proximity to the category of cause. It is precisely this that makes it causing-provocative even if it does not involve anything obscene.

This may be important from the perspective of coupling aesthetics and politics, for, when it comes to cause, the art of so-called direct action time and again reveals its inadequacy. For example, campaigns organized within its framework may aim at public mobilization and arousal of indignation about the repressive social order, but they themselves do not give an idea of what exactly should push one to this indignation. What such initiatives reproduce serves as a pretext and simultaneously a model for collective action, but not as a cause, which, apparently, someone else has to account for. In this sense, art that functions in this mode uses a resource it itself did not produce. The latter is to be found in the area outlined by the perverse mode of display.

The perverse replenishment of what the sociocritical aesthetics you pointed to lacks is accomplished, for example, in the works of director Zosia Rodkevich (Зося Родкевич), who is now famous thanks to her films in the genre of documentary political biography. Her earlier approach to working with the material, realized in the film “Temporary Children” (Временные дети)[iii], is revealing. This film is a perfect instance for clarifying the above-described nuances of the perverse mode because what is shown in it purely at the level of content balances on the verge of perversion in the usual, pre-theoretical sense of the word. Essentially, we see in the film nothing but the details of the everyday life of a small family enclave with semi-dressed children run by a sullen and grumpy foster mother. The narrative hook, from the point of view of possible piquant sadistic nuances, turns out to be extremely promising, but, contrary to expectations, nothing cruel is done to the children in the story—looking formally, the tape does not allow any claims against the protagonist to be made, humanitarian criticism has nothing to cling to here. 

But the shadow of a more subtle sense of trouble is felt in every movement of the film. Without resorting to any of the manipulative techniques of arthouse cinema or relying on protracted interstitial inserts serving to create a meaningful and ominous atmosphere, the director nonetheless manages to achieve the desired effect by allotting each scene an extra beat of time, compelling the viewer to mentally place a narrative full stop before the scene itself concludes. This protractedness is understood as insignificant and greatly irritates perception, initially creating an impression that the director got “lost” in the documentary material, but subsequently revealing itself as a deliberate and consistent method of reporting on what is happening to a child placed in certain conditions, where strict control periodically gives way to permissiveness, unleashing great amounts of wasted time.

An exemplary case in this regard is the “headache cure” scene[iv], which deserves a detailed analysis due to its temporal structure. One of the boys, who had been playing in the sun with his brothers for a long time, complained to the foster mother of a headache. She immediately seizes on this, offering him to master a “psychological technique” to get rid of the pain by assessing the level and color of water in an imaginary glass. Again and again, with unprecedented persistence, she suggests measuring these imaginary parameters aloud, asking the child about the extent to which his pain is beginning to yield to control due to these manipulations.

The scene is constructed in such a way that it excludes any catharsis—the headache seems to be unaffected by these dubious maneuvers, yet at a certain point, the glass shows a slight improvement, and the viewer begins to think this crazy method has actually worked. Nevertheless, it soon becomes apparent that nothing has changed. However, the organization of the scene precludes any possible condemnation since the child himself remains absent-mindedly serene throughout. The director even manages to suspend the mild horror that ultimately visits the viewer, who sees that the extremely prolonged game does not seem to bother the woman at all. But the scene truly reveals itself only later, when the boy tries to apply the procedure to his younger brother and, after the second attempt, as if acknowledging the cumbersomeness of the measure, hastily retreats with the words, “Now sit and say it twenty times.” The concession he makes in this moment to maternal power—to mother’s unmatched ability to wear down any situation through sheer exhaustion, and to her tireless, senseless enthusiasm—paradoxically conveys to the viewer the essence of power much more accurately than any overt, voiced critique of the tragic consequences of arbitrary rule ever could.

In this sense, the perverse mode of transmission achieves something that cannot be accomplished even using the most radical means, which, for example, are employed by transgressive art. This is where the advantage of the perverse storytelling lies, especially noticeable when it is contrasted to that unproductive polemic that art, whose critical message is deliberately laid bare, constantly risks getting involved in. Exposing always provokes heated and unproductive debates about the degree, for instance, the degree of the importance of raising specific questions, posing certain problems, the acceptability of the means employed to pose these problems, etc. While art that works in the perverse mode, thanks to the way it is structured, wittingly discloses the ridiculousness of such debates, also because it absolutely does not hide the fact that it has nothing to do with practical ambitions. 

In a certain sense, throughout the 20th century, art consciously utilized this deferral of the viewer’s satisfaction, thanks to which it advanced “forward.” Each major artist, director, or writer can accomplish the task of deferral in their own way, but this task was set for them one way or another. I completely agree that the less overt the perversion is in your implied sense, the better it works. In this case, the mode of that same “magic of art” is activated—when something is done with the viewer or reader, and he, in turn, feels it, but cannot understand what exactly happened. Though it seems it is precisely this way of functioning of art that is criticized by the left, which is driven by the impulse of total demystification, that is, a belief in the possibility of fully articulating, on the one hand, the content of the work, and on the other, its potential impact on the viewer. In your view, is complete demystification of the artistic object possible, and what might such a demystified object represent?

The thing is that what you call “the magic of impact” is transversal to the modes of art—this effect, whatever is meant by it, can arise in the wake of any artwork, no matter how secularized it is. It is so because the subject does not have a separate perceptual “organ” for reacting to works of art. The attempt to develop it, dating back to the Kantian formulation of the problem, is an impressive feat that continued throughout the 20th century. Strictly speaking, the main debate regarding aesthetics today is not an open dispute about the directions art takes or the methods it adopts, but an invisible yet persistent discussion about whether art can be worthy of a special channel of perception constructed by cultural means and specified exclusively for works of art. One should not underestimate the importance of this question, because if a perceptual construct corresponding to this channel can be worked out, it promises to significantly increase the stakes made on art, as well as a political force. That is why the quest for this construct will not cease anytime soon. But the work on its formation and improvement—carried out mainly on the philosophical stage—is countered by the psychoanalytic conviction that even the most specific aesthetic proposal will be received by the subject only because it somehow touches his desire as a whole, making no distinction between objects of so-called reality and those proposed by the artistic act.

This does not mean that the psychoanalytic perspective denies art’s ability to produce psychological effects that the subject would have no chance of encountering through other paths. On the contrary, psychoanalysis is even more likely to allow for such a possibility, because it itself, as a certain practice, produces effects in the subject’s desire which no one outside the psychoanalytic clinic has access to, even in the case of the richest life experience. Meanwhile, philosophy, cherishing unique consequences produced by art, is in no hurry to report that, in its opinion, the interaction with it produces something in the subject. Whenever this topic is discussed, one inevitably retreats to the territory laid out already by the representatives of the Frankfurt School, where art is spoken of as one of the means of prefiguring and, if possible, creating an alternative social reality. This approach, which has never been proven to be reliable, nevertheless has demonstrated a remarkable historical stability. At the same time, even the most novel ways of talking about these processes, for example, utilizing such terms as “performativity,” do not add anything new to the program and thus obfuscate the absence of theoretical advance in them. In other words, by immediately announcing, making explicit what consequences are desired, the question of what exactly happens in the territory of the subject during that restricted period when an artwork affects him is overlooked. Normative artistic criticism follows the same approach: while illuminating the various symbolic connections created by the work, it remains silent about the fact that justifying the inevitably emergent solipsistic dimension here requires, at minimum, presupposing the subject’s acceptance of both the occurrence and consequences of his encounter with the work.

On the one hand, we are quite far off today from the benevolent ideas of German Neo-Kantianism, which imply that it is always the same event that is at stake, the event triggered by the encounter with the so-called “meanings” and “values” that art represents. Here, resorting to the dominant idea that the perception of each artwork is situational also leads to nothing. Without falling into culturalism or, conversely, yielding to the temptation to psychologize, it nevertheless makes sense to distinguish a universal operation the subject performs in relation to an artwork. This operation, in my view, consists of the following: upon encountering the artwork, the subject asks himself to what extent he should reveal himself in response to the impression.

This point should be understood correctly, as it does not concern what action the subject may be required to carry out upon receiving the work’s message. Confusing the two is extremely characteristic of the art supported by the left-wing political forces, that is, art that, to some extent, agitates, incites one to commit deeds and to draw certain conclusions. Likewise, the desire to “share impressions” that is characteristic of communication about art, stemming from the traditions of hermeneutics, is also not implied here. It is all about revelation, as a degree of transparency, of changes that have taken place in the subject’s position as a result of encountering the artwork. 

Of course, the result of this revelation will differ depending on the modes pointed out above. So, if you encounter a perverse artwork, say, such as the ones you gave as instances, and it significantly affects you, the degree of your revelation will still be minimal. The subject who favors this approach and even sometimes is capable of giving detailed art-historical commentaries on it hardly ever reports on the shifts, even the most significant ones, that took place in his position. This is precisely what irritates the adherents of the socially-engaged art, since the subject who receives a perverse artwork turns out to be inaccessible to them in their coordinates—it appears to be impossible to establish directly what art has prompted him to do. Despite that significant changes in the position of this subject also accumulate, it is impossible to define them ideologically: it is unclear, for example, in which direction his views will move on the scale of opinions on necessary freedoms, the rights of the minorities and the oppressed, etc.—this is not evident also because those changes will most likely be outside this scale. If it makes sense to talk about demystification in the artistic realm, it should concern precisely this parameter: regardless of the degree of indirectness, veiledness of the means used to produce the aesthetic statement—or, on the contrary, their directness—the degree of demystification will ultimately depend on where the subject is located on the scale of transparency of the consequences that follow the encounter with art.

A paradox can be observed here. On the one hand, the leftist discourse often takes an extremely critical position towards the modern internet as a technology that makes everyone transparent to structures that “produce desires and control the population.” On the other hand, its representatives insist on art that implies the greatest possible transparency of the viewer’s reactions. At the same time, art made to be seen on the internet (I mean not digital art, but art whose creators care more about photo documentation and subsequent online presentation of its results than the physical presentation of their work) cannot guarantee such transparency of the viewer’s perception at all. Perhaps, for this reason in particular, this art tends towards the perverse type of artistic language and does not strive to declare its claims and demands to the world. However, if the pathos of changing existing reality through art has never lived up to its promise, what potential impact of art can we still talk about, and what degree can our pathos reach without risking resulting in an engaged type of speculation?

The thing is that the pathos of change failed to deliver precisely where changes were actively announced, pointing to them as a prospect of the near future on the condition that society has enough moral strength to adhere to a certain agenda. This is not about failure, but about the regularities that allow shedding light on the pretensions of the contemporary subject. This subject, originally a moderately reformist figure that emerged during the Enlightenment, has evolved into someone literally obsessed with the necessity for change, which for him is most closely connected with the category of “action.” Special designations, such as “direct action,” are invented for this category today, although it is the same old metaphysically justified action, only embellished with the expected reward, that is, more or less immediate consequences of this action.

It needs to be understood that the desire for change involves a significant flaw, so significant that it should be considered a kind of negative categorical imperative of contemporaneity. This flaw initially manifested as a particular phenomenon in the psychoanalytic treatment, and it is not a coincidence that the latter, for the first time in European medical history, sought not so much to relieve suffering, but more to achieve changes in the psyche and life of the analyzand. Meanwhile, the initial clinical experience in this field has shown Freud that the patient was least likely to unfold in the direction of the importance of mastering which he spoke about during sessions. Trying to convince both himself and the analyst that he intends to act in a certain direction and is undergoing treatment precisely for this purpose, the analysand, in fact, one way or another, sabotages his plans or pursues some other activity. 

It is well known how Freud explains this paradox: as he sees it, there is initially something greater in the intentions of the patient than what he declares, since he is driven by a fantasm that contains the idea of retribution for the implementation of those intentions, making the movement in the chosen direction seem unsafe. Nevertheless, what is declared still retains its value as a guide, but due to the impossibility of approaching desire, the action changes its sign, and now the subject attacks his previous intentions, hindering their implementation. It should be said that this explanation was not accepted by Freud at face value, although he constantly used the implications that followed from it, thus reminding himself of what could be expected from analysands and what, on the contrary, one should not count on despite their fervent assurances and apparent enthusiasm.

Freud’s insight would have remained a private excess of the clinic of neurosis if not for the difficulties that the politicized intellectual environment faced later. Those difficulties made it so that the possibility of achieving social change was the only thing that justified this environment’s existence. In every attempt to create hotbeds of activity within this environment, what comes to the fore is what is to this day tendentiously interpreted as the contemporary subject’s inertia, his unfortunate hesitation, his insufficient loyalty to the idea, his lack of solidarity where it seems necessary. It is precisely this that forces the representatives of activism, both in the artistic field and beyond it, to resort to a moralizing tone, that is, to the least powerful means possible. The subject is being reproached and spurred, but this approach inevitably leads one to an impasse, since what one demands in this case is fickle and depends on this or that protest agenda, on the conjuncture of signifiers that are deemed to be relevant, urgent.

In contrast, in every project where the efficiency of this method is called into question, a different path is chosen, and it is suggested there, leaving the hope of direct impact, to insert between the subject and his suppositional goals something of the third. Depending on the specific theoretical solution, the instance of the unconscious, a linguistic or topological structure, a matheme, or something of the like may be interposed. The important thing here is that such an instance is inserted not for simple mediation, but to denote a radical split, whose common imperative reads: “The consequences of your actions will never take place where you address them.” Roughly speaking, according to this logic, the subject has to be prepared that something else may happen instead of what he aimed at. Thus, what was perceived by Freud as a neurotic resistance requiring working through and removal subsequently became the current situation in which the subject finds himself and from which he is fully capable of generating certain consequences. The logic at work here is based on the fact that something that could not have been initially counted on will be produced. It is precisely this that would gain the status of consequence.

In connection with this, an engrossing illustration could be Lacan’s discussion of marriage. In short, it amounts to the fact that marriage is actually “made in heaven,” that is, that it serves the enjoyment of God. This statement is usually understood as if the marriage enterprise required a legal act of ratification, after which the previously illegal amorous interaction between spouses becomes permissible, since it falls under the jurisdiction of the legislative authority that infuses the act with a good, higher meaning. On the contrary, Lacan demands our regnition that the subject remains alienated from the symbolic law and the consequences of its affirmation no matter what: however legitimate your partner may be, regardless what you do with him or her, you continue to perform exactly the same actions as before the marriage—they do not acquire any new meaning. Any consequences that may arise in the social sphere from the fact that your unity has been legalized, including very real family-wide and even social changes (for example, the recognition by the community of misalliance and interracial or “non-traditional” marriages), will take place exclusively within the domain of the symbolic order, which your marriage may affirm; but these consequences can in no way be derived from the love procedure you practice. This means the subject can only enjoy his partner in a perverse, illegal way, outside the law, even when married, while the main symbolically effective legal consequences will occur in another place. Whereas the law itself, without perverse practices taking place on its territory, would be meaningless and would have no consequences. 

The above also fully applies to art. Your described agent of direct action, who expects the aims of a statement to coincide with the consequences of its articulation, practices an expectation that, even in its most secularized version, continues the ancient tradition of art’s “higher purpose.” However, that perverse, partial enjoyment the subject can invest in the artwork does not aim for any coincidence with the equally partial enjoyment of the receiver, because the symbolic law that turns a statement into a work of art sits on the other side from these two excesses of enjoyment. While the artwork can have consequences, it might produce a certain shift solely because these non-coinciding excesses exist. 

 

[i] English in the original.

[ii] English in the original.

[iii] https://vimeo.com/15818671

[iv] https://vimeo.com/33662472