Aesthetic experience and intersubjective constitution of the individual
In some recent papers I have suggested seeing the psychoanalytic theory of sublimation and the aesthetic theory of the sublime jointly as theories of subjectivation (Civitarese, 2014b, 2016b, 2017b). The challenge of the aesthetic as a discipline is to investigate in form the mystery of art and the feeling of beauty that it arouses in us, and which we experience as something that lifts us towards the human and towards authentic existence. This is not dissimilar to the challenge of psychoanalytic theorizing to develop a discourse that can say indirectly how the early forms of the psychic come into being. In my opinion, the aesthetic expe -rience in art and in psychoanalytic practice are concerned with the intersubjective or social constitution of the individual, understood at its pre-reflective or inter-corporeal level. In order to fine-tune some instruments that may help us intuit where the intersection between these two modes of human experience is located, and following some suggestions from my reading, I shall try here to interweave the figure of the whirlpool with the concepts of rhythm and idea (or rather, of sensible idea).
Whirlpools
I take my inspiration for proposing the image of the whirlpool from a note by Walter Benjamin, who makes it an emblem of origin immanent in the present.
However, I owe my knowledge of the note to a book by Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale (2014).
A whirlpool is created when a flow of water comes up against an obstacle or by the meeting of two currents of water running in opposite directions. This struggle between forces becomes a new form characterized by its own rhythm.
The new form attracts nearby elements into its movement. The status of the whirlpool, observes Agamben, is singular. It is a form in itself, enclosed and clearly circumscribed, but at the same time confused with the medium of which it is part. It follows its own laws, but nothing belongs to it specifically.
The key word here is ‘rhythmical’. What the author is describing can be entirely superimposed on the idea of rhythm as something that undermines (in Italian:
intacca) the measured time of the chronometer and this way defines the singularity
of the subject. But unlike rhythm, and even though the term can also be used metaphorically in reference to the non-musical, the figure of the whirlpool lends itself better to representing the movement and play of forces.
Let us think of portrayals of whirlpools in literature and painting: of the fascinating story by Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, or JMW Turner and his Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. Obviously what interests us in these finely crafted forms is the thought of them as allegories of emotional (or sensory and emotional, or senso-motoric) whirlpools which are the foundation of psychic birth. The (emotional) ‘whirlpools’ of the primordial mother–infant relationship or the analytic field (the therapeutic relationship) are potential opportunities for the subject to be (re)born; situations in which lines of tension emerge and are shaped into dynamic, ordered and directed structures.
One indication which confirms our intuition can be found in Signs, by Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 40), where the author makes use of the image of the whirlpool to portray ‘the whole of the spoken language surrounding the child’; a whole in ordered movement which sucks him back inside himself, bringing him from the chaos of the sensory to sense. Let us now go more deeply into the concept of rhythm.
Rhythms
I have always found this sentence of Winnicott’s (1949, p. 184, my italics) illumi -nating about the meaning of music-as-container of the most primitive anxieties:
Belonging to this feeling of helplessness [at birth] is the intolerable nature of experiencing something without any knowledge whatever of when it will end.
. . . It is for this reason fundamentally that form in music is so important.
Through form, the end is in sight from the beginning.
These lines came to my mind when I subsequently came across a chapter in another book by Agamben, The Man without Content, which deals with rhythm and is entitled ‘The Original Structure of the Work of Art’. The incipit is flashy. Agamben quotes Hölderlin: ‘Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is one heavenly rhythm, just as every work of art is one rhythm, and everything swings from the poetizing lips of the god’ (1994, p. 94). Then the author wonders wherein consists this original character of the work of art which the poet assigns to rhythm. So, making reference to ancient philosophy he assimilates rhythm to the concept of
‘structure, schema, as opposed to elementary and inarticulate matter’ (ibid., p. 97).
The original being of any work of art would simply be ῥυθμός (‘structure’) (ibid., p. 98). But what structure is in question here? Not structure as number but as
‘ουσία, the principle of presence that opens and maintains the work of art in its original space’ (ibid.). The term ‘rhythm’ comes from the Greek ῥέω, to pass, to flow. Whatever flows, flows in time. But into this unstoppable flow of linear time, impersonal and unclaimed, rhythm bursts like:
a split and a stop. Thus in a musical piece, although it is somehow in time, we perceive rhythm as something that escapes the incessant flight of instants and appears almost as the presence of an atemporal dimension in time. In the same way, when we are before a work of art or a landscape bathed in the light of its own presence, we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time . . . but this being arrested is also a being-outside, an ék-stasis in a more original dimension . . . it is the original ecstasy that opens for man the space of his world.
(ibid., pp. 99–100) If I understand Agamben correctly, I would say that this is a question of identity and difference. Rhythm takes us out of ourselves, immersed as we are in the unnoticed flow of time, and by making us rediscover this crucial dimension it constitutes us as subjects. Rhythm roots us in the consciousness of time as the original domain of our being. In this, the echoes of Heidegger are obvious.
In order to explore further the suggestions coming from Agamben, it is useful to read them in the light of the beautiful book, Listening, by Jean–Luc Nancy (2002). In this study he perhaps clarifies better the sense of rhythm as a ‘continual differing from oneself ’. Nancy writes:
Perhaps we should thus understand the child who is born with his first cry as himself being – his being or his subjectivity – the sudden expansion of an echo chamber, a vault where what tears him away and what summons him resound at once, setting in vibration a column of air, of flesh, which sounds at its apertures: body and soul of some one new and unique.
(ibid., pp. 17–18) For the human being, any seeing is seeing oneself seeing (Vedersi vedersi is the title of a beautiful book on Valéry by Valerio Magrelli (2007)) and any hearing is hearing oneself hear. And thus openness to the world is established and the space for interiority is created. But if there is a ‘rhythm’ of seeing, this notion becomes yet more pregnant when we consider listening. Seeing is already compromised by association with the rational pole of being (θεωρέιν means ‘to look’, ‘to see’), with representation – and it is on the centrality of representation that Freud erected his theoretical edifice. Hearing, however, is still further beyond language. It has more to do with sense than with meaning. More to do with the body than with the intellect. Rhythm cuts out strips of time and in doing so subjectivizes it.
Furthermore, it introduces a sense of space. Only time makes it possible for the spaces which typesetters place between words to become effective in constructing the meaning of the sentence. Technically this is called ‘spacing’. The word is an addition to time and space, or rather, to duration which makes itself into space.
‘Rhythm’, writes Nancy, ‘separates the succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time: it bends time to give it to time itself, and it is in this way that it folds and unfolds a “self ” ’ (ibid., p. 17). And he wonders, ‘isn’t the subject
itself the starting of time in both values of the genitive: it opens it and it is opened by it? Isn’t the subject the attack of time?’ (ibid., p. 75).
The notion of rhythm returns insistently when we find ourselves faced with the key theoretical crux of contemporary psychoanalysis, the unrepresentable:
that is, the dimension of sense that both precedes and then accompanies linguistic signification, but which withdraws from any kind of translation that is not essentially intermodal (from one medium to another). It happens that I have addressed this on at least three occasions: in relation to aesthetic conflict, in a chapter of The Violence of Emotions (Civitarese, 2011a), in the essay on Ferro entitled, appositely, ‘Spacings’ (Ferro and Civitarese, 2015), and lastly in a recent study of masochism (see Chapter 3). In the last of these the concept of rhythm becomes the keystone of an attempt at an alternative theorization of masochism from the starting point of Freud’s annotations in two of his three key essays on this subject, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and ‘The economic problem of maso -chism.’ In these wonderful works Freud gets to grips with the enigma of pleasure in pain:
It seems that in the series of feelings of tension we have a direct sense of the increase and decrease of amounts of stimulus, and it cannot be doubted that there are pleasurable tensions and unpleasurable relaxations of tension. The state of sexual excitation is the most striking example of a pleasurable increase of stimulus of this sort, but it is certainly not the only one.
Pleasure and unpleasure, therefore, cannot be referred to an increase or decrease of a quantity (which we describe as “tension due to stimulus”), although they obviously have a great deal to do with that factor. It appears that they depend, not on this quantitative factor, but on some characteristic of it which we can only describe as a qualitative one. If we were able to say what this qualitative characteristic is, we should be much further advanced in psychology. Perhaps it is the rhythm, the temporal sequence of changes, rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus. We do not know.
(Freud, 1924, p. 160) If it is a question of rhythm and not of absolute values, this also means that the first moment of unpleasure at the increase of tension is nevertheless a component of the pleasure, and that every pleasure can be called a negative pleasure.
A further extraordinarily fertile suggestion about rhythm can be found in Nietzsche (2001, p. 84). In an aphorism devoted to the origin of poetry he speaks about the power of rhythm ‘that reorganizes all the atoms of a sentence’, and constrains not only the body to a certain cadence of movements, but the soul itself, and even ‘the souls of the gods’, enabling us to draw closer to their ear and almost oblige them, so to speak, to keep time with us and receive our prayer. As Nietzsche observes, ‘even the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm, if only insofar as he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metric form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip and jump’ (ibid., pp. 85–86).
Ideas
‘Contact of the nipple with the baby’s mouth’ (writes Winnicott (1964, p. 40)),
‘gives the baby ideas! “perhaps there may be something there outside the mouth worth going for.” ’ What is intriguing in this sentence is the word, ‘ideas’. We cannot think that these are ideas in the true sense: that is, belonging to someone who can think their own thoughts. It must mean a special, rudimentary idea, the body’s idea. In the same way, Bion speaks of the ‘conception’which arises from the encounter of a pre-conception with a realization. Unlike ‘concept’, the word
‘conception’ has more to do with an idea of process, and lends itself better to indicating a dimension of experience which is more of a pre-reflective or non-verbal order, as in a dance in which one is engaged with the other, than a psychic content of a representational type.
I hope it is clear at this point what model I am proposing in order to identify the point at which aesthetic experience in art and in psychoanalytic practice conjoin: when the turbulences of sensations and proto-emotions become rhythms, and ideas arise from the calming rhythms, proto-ideas or sensible ideas at first, and then, after words are added, concepts. I hope it is also clear what I mean when I speak of an aesthetic paradigm in psychoanalysis: nothing aestheticising or vaguely ‘artistic’, even if there is an undoubted artistic component in our work.
However, the aesthetic experience in psychoanalysis must make reference to the intersubjective constitution of the individual. The term ‘intersubjective’
(perhaps it would be better to replace it with ‘transindividual’; Cimatti, 2015) is often mistaken for interaction between two separate subjects (as would be the case within the frame of an interpersonal model) instead of an intermediate area or space that stands between, in the middle. In the more specific use I propose, the term instead refers above all to the social birth of the individual, but understood in Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s sense of Ineinandersein (Szanto and Moran, 2015, p. 108) – that is, one being in the other – of the interconnection/interweaving, initially concrete/sensory and only later involving ideas, which makes us subjects.
Creating concepts of things, abs-tracting, means simplifying, reducing a variety of objects to a common feature, eliminating differences and grasping similar-ities. This is how – through a sublimating transformation – we attain the status of subjects.
From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the emotional unison between mother and baby is a sort of primordial abstraction – an expression which Cesar and Sara Botella (2001, p. 44) instead reserves for the synthesis which arises from the encounter between the hallucinatory and the perceptual – and occurs first in the dimension of the purely sensory and indistinct, and then in that of the affective/sentimental space (which is, however, always a conceptualized space if we take account of its being provided for the system-couple by the mother). The possibility of synthesising the con-cepts of logic is created only at the end. As Wittgenstein (1969, p. 96) writes, ‘Knowledge is in the end based on acknow ledgement [Das Wissen gründet sich am Schluß auf der Anerkennung]’. The body that is ‘lost’ in the ascent
to the concept is the body as a source of dark and imprecise sensations. In this sense, subjectivating oneself does not mean losing but taking body in the sense of endowing oneself with the necessary emotional categories, the ‘sensible concepts’
indispensable for life.
But in this sense the prototype of a ‘concept’ is the area that gives calming sensations corresponding to the surfaces where the baby’s cheek meets the mother’s breast. Is it not the case that the institution of this area of contact consists in identifying a being-common for two different terms?
In conclusion, it is important to realize how unision (being-one) is always really a finding of unity in diversity. It is thus, in generating the unity in which the concept contains being-common, that the object (but also art) fulfils the task of ordering the infant’s multiple representations; and those of the ‘infant’ in the adult, an expression which allegorizes the endurance in the adult of the (emotional-sensory or semiotic) level of functioning that I have tried to illustrate with the figures of the whirlpool and of rhythm, and additionally that aspect of the adult which is still plastic and susceptible to evolution.