Abject visions

Powers of horror in art and visual culture

Rina Arya, Nicholas Chare, Rina Arya, Nicholas Chare

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719096297
• eBook ISBN: 9781784997724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This major new volume brings together leading international scholars to debate the continuing importance and relevance of the concept of abjection for the interpretation of modern and contemporary culture. This genuinely interdisciplinary collection includes important new essays that draw on the work of Georges Bataille, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and other key critical thinkers to provide innovative readings of works of art, film, theatre and literature. The clear and accessible essays in this volume extend the existing literature on abjection in exciting new ways to demonstrate the enduring richness of the concept.

1

Abjection, art and bare life

John Lechte

When I saw the ‘Abject Art’ show at the Whitney, I thought, What is abject about it? Everything was very neat; the objects were clearly art works. They were on the side of the victor. (Denis Hollier)

The domain of abjection and the excluded part

Since the publication in 1980 of Julia Kristeva’s innovative work (Kristeva, 1980), we know that, psychoanalytically, the subject is put in question by abjection – or, better: that there is no fully formed subject in abjection because there is no object before which subjectivity (including an ego) could emerge. While it may be true that subjectivity is in part constituted by an effort of expulsion of the abject ‘thing’ and that this can have echoes throughout the life of the individual, it is not a matter of an object with a negative sign (abject) opposed to one with a positive sign (object of desire). As Kristeva makes clear in a passage which has not received the attention which it deserves – perhaps not even from Kristeva herself¹ – we note that: ‘The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest [ob-jeu], an objet petit “a” ceaselessly fleeing in the systematic quest of desire’ (Kristeva, 1982: 1, trans. modified). Least of all, then, can the abject be contained in a representation in as far as every representation is based on an object-ification. The abject is thus not to be confused with the object in the mirror stage which, as Jacques Lacan said, is based in identification and is formative of the ‘I’ (subject). Indeed, if the object is the mediating thing through which the subject can gauge itself in the world, abjection evokes an immediate force that fragments the embryonic ego/ subject. There is no room to manoeuvre in an immersion in meaninglessness, repugnance and incoherence – everything, in effect, that subjectivity will strive to keep at bay in its ego life within the borders of sociality.

Anthropologically, abjection has been seen to do with the ambiguity of borders, in particular, those of the body and its markers (hair of the head, nails, body fluids, human excreta, erotic sexuality) and those of transitional states (menstruation, childhood/adulthood, marriage, the cadaver) and things that do not fit in and are excluded from social life (rubbish or filth, individuals who are different – ‘unclean’ (the leper), food that is out of place (not blessed). The abject must be dealt with, lest purity be undermined; but it is, at the same time, what one would prefer not to know about and which, in a sense, one cannot ‘know’, to the extent that knowledge privileges the object.

Ambivalence in relation to abjection emerges with regard to an identity which becomes fragile and ambiguous, especially if we recall Bataille’s idea of ‘continuity’ or communication as the blurring of borders between beings, most notably in eroticism. Both anthropology (Mary Douglas), and psychoanalysis (Kristeva) see ambivalent states of the sacred and the concomitant fragility of identity as key components of culture, eliciting as they do religious rituals and prohibitions along with innovative symbolic incarnations, which, Kristeva suggests, keep abjection at bay. The correlate is that when symbolic forms break down, there is a risk of abjection taking hold.

As I have shown, crime is also part of the abject, especially as corruption (cf. Lechte, 2011). For then, what appears as upright behaviour becomes a cover for hypocritical self-interest. Crime is thus double-edged, as far as abjection is concerned: on the one hand, the criminal who openly flouts the law is not abject and may well deserve the status of a hero. On the other hand, the judge and similar persons of status and authority who publicly, but hypocritically, uphold the law while secretly on the take are abject. Such behaviour is the subject of revulsion before it can be represented or objectified. It is not immoral – which can be proclaimed – but is amoral, with which it is impossible to identify – an impossibility that also pertains to the one engaged in amoral behaviour.

Crime, then, is abject when it cannot be made to come under the auspices of the law (including the moral law) or even under the sway of language, to the extent that a key element of language is codification and abjection defies codification. At the level of sociality, one assumption is that the law’s raison d’être is to purify – or at minimum deal with – criminality. Another is that the law creates the criminal (Michel Foucault) and that it is first a form of violence (Walter Benjamin) before it is peaceful codification. Whatever the case, the basis of the law remains the subject of profound ambiguity and uncertainty. Freud’s founding myth of the primal horde only confounds the ambiguity; for, as Freud himself acknowledges, the ‘murder’ of the father is only possible after the father’s death at the hands of the sons, that is to say, retrospectively, something that goes against the whole meaning of law. The law, in a sense, can have no origin (it would be an-archical) – or rather, a profound law-lessness is at the origin of the law. But this does not make sense; we do not want (in a profoundly visceral sense) to accept it; it is abject!

Be all this as it may, the question that must now be put to art and science is: can abjection truly be incorporated in an object of appreciation and knowledge? Would it not rather be that abjection undermines art and knowledge? For, to repeat, the abject is not an object, which it needs to be to enter the realms of art or epistemology. It is not for nothing that art is referred to as the sphere of the ‘art object’. Let us look at the notion of ‘heterology’ in this light.

Heterology

In Bataille’s to date unpublished piece on heterology,² we can see the coincidence, at certain points, of heterology and abjection. Heterology – or, as Bataille’s manuscript puts it: ‘the science of the heterogeneous. That is to say, the science of the excluded part (or at the very least of the mode of exclusion that creates this part)’ – would seek to bring the excluded part into the fold of science in order that it might be objectified. But, as we have said, the abject is beyond, or prior to objectification. It is not therefore amenable to ‘heterology’; for it is not amenable to the logos (discourse, science) of hetero-logy (science of difference).

As Kristeva notes, Bataille wrote an early essay on abjection, albeit from the perspective of those subject to abject poverty (misère). Of importance here is the idea that the abject poor, who have become things, must be excluded from society proper and this gesture of exclusion is yet constitutive of social life. Indeed, according to Bataille, it makes possible the sovereignty of a heterogeneous nobility: ‘The act of exclusion has the same meaning as social or divine sovereignty, but it is not located on the same level; it is precisely located in the domain of things and not, like sovereignty, in the domain of persons’ (Bataille, 1970: 220). This ‘act of exclusion’ coincides with Bataille’s concept of community as the union of ‘those who have no community’ – that is, of those who, as a kind of non-group, are thoroughly heterogeneous to all forms of society and even to the human as a whole (recall Agamben’s homo sacer).

Heterology, then, as the ‘science of the excluded part’, points to a domain that is entirely other and foreign to identity and the order of the Same. And it is this which requires scrutiny and interpretation. Accordingly, the following is the key passage: ‘Heterology receives therefore from the start a minimum definition – as the knowledge of what appears as completely other’.

When abjection is under scrutiny, though, it is a matter of deciding whether what is ‘completely other’ – a definition which, for all intents and purposes, also applies to the abject – leads to the destruction of art and knowledge rather than being part of their fulfilment. Can there really be an art of the abject?

‘Return of the real’ and cinema

Duchamp, I think single-handedly, demonstrated that it is entirely possible for something to be art without having anything to do with taste at all, good or bad. Thus he put an end to that period of aesthetic thought and practice which was concerned, to use a title of David Hume’s, with the standard of taste. This does not mean that the era of taste (goût) has been succeeded by the era of disgust (dégoût). It means, rather, that the era of taste has been succeeded by the era of meaning. The question is not whether something is in good or bad taste, but what does it mean [sic]. (Danto, 2000: 9)

This is a fundamental point, especially in light of what was said above about abjection. For, in highlighting meaning, Danto might seem to have changed the terms of the debate. However, if the debate is about whether or not the abject as such can appear, meaning thus becomes embroiled with the appearance or non-appearance of the abject. It is worth presenting other aspects of Danto’s take on abject art. We find that even though the abject is what cannot appear – it keeps on appearing!³

As Danto explains, ‘What was initially so revolting to viewers of Modern Art, whenever it began, was that it itself gave offense, not that it represented offensive things’ (2000: 3). However, even though the material content of what was frequently called disgusting and implicitly placed in the category of abject art (in particular, Duchamp’s urinal) was rarely as objectionable as some critics (e.g., Jean Claire, director of the Musée Picasso in Paris) made out, there is no doubt that Danto, like most critics, accepts that in the last two decades of the twentieth century a transformation occurred where, instead of aiming to present, in the Kantian manner, what was pleasing, artists evoked Duchamp’s gesture of 1917 when the now legendary urinal, signed ‘R. Mutt’ was submitted to, and rejected by, the Society of Independent Artists for its annual exhibition. According to Danto, this gesture prompted art practice to reorient itself and to confront the viewer with what was and often is disturbing, or repulsive, if not abject. Indeed, ‘a case can be made’ says our critic, ‘that Duchamp made it possible for artists today to use “abject” materials to produce experiences in viewers’ (2000: 9). Once artists are no longer constrained by the notion of ‘good taste’, they are then at liberty to broaden the materials repertoire of art and for this they are, argues Danto, to be applauded.

In engaging with this theme, the art historian and theorist, Hal Foster, adopts a Lacanian stance in arguing that what is called the abject in art is in fact a return of the real as a missed encounter – of the real experienced as a trauma that can only ever be repeated, as is exemplified, says Foster, by the work of Andy Warhol, work that becomes an instance of the compulsion to repeat characteristic of the trauma of the missed encounter (Foster, 1996: 127–168). In his analysis of the ‘cult’ of the abject in art asks Foster: ‘Why this fascination with trauma, this envy of abjection today?’ (1996: 166). This is an important question to which we shall later return.

In cinema, too, Martine Beugnet, after referring to Foster’s notion of a ‘return of the real’ in art is moved to say that:

A comparable shift is noticeable in the work of a film-maker like Grandrieux, whose achievement, as Nicole Brenez emphasizes, rests specifically on the willingness to use cinema to approach these borderline experiences of the human condition that both Lacan and Bataille evoked in their writing. (Beugnet, 2005: 178)

According to Brenez, as cited by Beugnet:

‘The image is no longer given as a reflection, discourse, or the currency of whatever absolute value; it works to invest immanence, using every type of sensation, drive and affect. To make a film means […] confronting the sheer terror of the death drive (Sombre), or the still more immense and bottomless terror of the unconscious, of total opacity (La Vie nouvelle).’ (Brenez, 2003 in Beugnet, 2005: 178)

More specifically, for Beugnet,

The fluid, elliptical structure of the two films thus eschews conventional dramatic progression. There are no precise, explicit motivations to the actions of Sombre’s main characters, and their journey does not seem to lead anywhere in particular. Similarly, La Vie nouvelle offers a nondescript geographical and fictional space of devastation, where the characters appear in erratic, elliptical fashion, to enact an obscure tale of desire and revenge. (180)

In La Vie nouvelle

The bodies thus metamorphose into monstrous creatures, eyeless, translucent silhouettes, part-human, part-animal, howling and hovering blindly in the dark, and tearing up each others’ flesh – a scene of utter chaos, filled by the mixed sounds of a rumbling noise and distorted yells. (182)

Often, Beugnet notes, background and figures in both films become so indistinct that one is reminded of Georges Bataille’s notion of the informe (the formless), a term used by a number of commentators as a synonym for the abject. And, indeed, it evokes the struggle for identity that takes place to avoid the merging of self and other deemed to be at the heart of the Kristevan, psychoanalytic view of the abject.⁴

Thus, as with the other arts, so too with cinema: the effort to please is replaced by a desire to shock, or to let appear what was previously thought should not appear – or so it would seem. In any event, something has happened in art and cinema. But is it to do with the representation or presentation of the real or the abject as such? Clearly, to the extent that the abject is defined as that which cannot be represented or presented – as that which cannot be objectified – it cannot appear in the objectifications in art or cinema. On the other hand, it might be that the mode of appearing of the abject is entirely unique and that it is this which needs to be addressed. For instance, we could propose that the abject appears in the same way that style does in art. And that just as there is no singular entity that can encapsulate the style of a work, so there is no abject object. Or again, it may be that the kind of presence that the abject has in art and cinema is analogous to the semiotic in Kristeva’s sense. The semiotic is in language and signs – it is the level of signifiance – yet cannot appear in its own right independently of the symbolic. It is nevertheless distinct from the symbolic.

That it is difficult to avoid objectifying the abject can b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: approaching abjection – Rina Arya and Nicholas Chare
• 1 Abjection, art and bare life – John Lechte
• 2 Queering abjection: a lesbian, feminist and Canadian perspective – Jayne Wark
• 3 Manet’s abject Surrealism – Nicholas Chare
• 4 Juan Davila’s abject after-image – Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson
• 5 Animals, art, abjection – Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn
• 6 The fragmented body as an index of abjection – Rina Arya
• 7 Skin, body, self: the question of the abject in the work of Francis Bacon – Ernst van Alphen
• 8 Abjection, melancholia and ambiguity in the works of Catherine Bell – Estelle Barrett
• 9 Corpus delicti – Kerstin Mey
• 10 Art is on the way: from the abject opening of Underworld to the shitty ending of Oblivion – Calvin Thomas
• 11 Base materials: performing the abject object – Daniel Watt
• Index