The imaginary dis-order
Let’s face it. No matter who we are and where we are, we’re all more or less caught up in an imaginary dis-order. How do we know what we know? If what we know is true or even interesting to someone other than ourselves? If what we create can have the slightest impact on anyone else? Our entire society is based on the systematic avoidance of these questions. As soon as we start asking them, we discover how little we know and how often we behave as if it were the opposite. It’s precisely from this “as if” position that the imaginary operates. The imaginary order is the fundamental narcissism through which human subjects create fantasy images of themselves and their ideal object of desire. According to Jacques Lacan, the human psyche is governed by “the real”, “the symbolic” and “the imaginary” order. If one had to give a brutal and simplistic translation of these three orders, one could say that “the real” is what I’m trying to escape, “the symbolic” is what I am and “the imaginary” is what I would like to be. In this issue of Paletten, after having addressed the real and the symbolic order in two previous publications, we’re finally addressing the imaginary order.
The imaginary is a matter of “thinking through images,” but also through concepts and representations that give us the illusion of mastery. Hamlet’s existential doubts on the power of language expressed in his famous lamentation “Words, words, words,” could today be replaced by a subject deploring the impotence of “Images, images, images.” We live in a time completely dominated by the imaginary order, by fears and fantasies of what it means to be human in a world filled with global disasters, wars and failures. The imaginary is not something that withdraws from the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. How can we deconstruct the imaginary without deconstructing the very foundation of what keeps our selves together? When we enter depression or melancholia, our imagination is the first thing that gets affected, distorted and sometimes even annihilated.
At the Psychiatric clinic of La Pitié Salpêtrière in Paris we have a room called “Les imaginaires” where I and my fellow colleagues conduct all kinds of therapies. Once a week I meet there with patients to discuss and analyse postcards I’ve collected, most of them depicting paintings or film-stills from all over the world. In this “image game” as I call this therapy form, I ask each and everyone to choose an image and talk as freely as possible about what the image conveys to them. The image thus becomes a psychonautic tool, a vehicle towards the unconscious, revealing thoughts and feelings that were until then unspoken and sometimes even unthinkable for the person in question. The stories I get to hear often move me beyond comparison, and their analyses of the images are more precise, personal and inventive than most of today’s art criticism. Is there a better way to travel towards the imaginary than thinking and speaking through images or a smoother way to create a little bit of order in the imaginary dis-order? I don’t think so.
Without the imaginary reordering of the disorder we would be completely traumatised by the encounter with the real. And too much imagination can produce suffering as well. Let’s take Cervantes’ Don Quixote for example. All of his battles are more or less delusional, especially the ones with the windmills. Yet, through his refusal of dreaming his life, instead of living it as Proust’s protagonists most often do, Cervantes' hilarious vagabond succeeds through his imaginary ideals and actions in transfiguring reality. He should therefore not be looked upon as a fool who takes his dreams for reality, but as a wise man that refuses taking the social fabric of reality as something given once and for all. Don Quixote’s idealistic and action based quest for a better world, allows him to follow his desire until the end, where of course another misfortune takes over, the tragedy of disillusion.
The adventure of Don Quixote ends where the adventure of psychoanalysis begins, that is with the patient's recognition despite their resistance, that they are speaking of a being that has never been anything else than the product of their own imagination. It can take ages to come to this point. That’s why psychoanalysts play on their absence, trying to intervene as little as possible in the discourse of the patient, allowing the latter to identify the gap between the imaginary self and being, between alienating and productive identifications, between the big Other and little others.
Yet in pulling away the veil of the symbolic fiction, we do not immediately find ourselves with an unmediated access to the real. When Groucho Marx was caught in an obvious lie, his response was: “Whom do you believe—my words or your eyes?” The belief in the big Other is believing in words, even when they contradict one’s own eyes. Who should we believe? Can we even believe in ourselves?
As Lacan repeatedly reminds us, real madness is not to lose the identity of the Ego but to posit the Ego as one undivided identity. The fool is not the fool that believes he’s a king but the king who believes he’s a king. The imaginary is therefore a space for both identification and misrecognition, for entrapments and liberations. How can we love, eat, have fun, party, travel, work or vote without falling in the trap of false identifications? And what about art? Isn’t the artworld what life was for Macbeth – a big imaginary “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Art like fantasies and everything else that entertains our visual pleasure gives us an enjoyment embodied in the external Other. However, in a society that commands, rather than prohibits, enjoyment becomes a duty, even the enjoyment of our symptoms.
Interpretation becomes meaningless unless we dismantle the way art objects and discourses about art objects produce imaginary satisfactions. In the “mirror stage” of a child, the mother, or the recognition of the other whoever this other is, is crucial for the development of the child. If this doesn’t occur, the child will enter a dual relationship with an imagined other, constantly looking for recognition. A lot of us are caught up in the imaginary order. If the imaginary order is the necessary narcissism by which humans create fantasy images of both themselves and their ideal object of desire, the entire art world could be seen as a hub for more or less narcissistic mirroring, in quest for imaginary recognition. Today this quest is bigger than ever and we will see how.
In an essay written especially for Paletten, French psychoanalyst Fabrice Bourlez explores the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale “Strangers everywhere”. In his statement the biennial curator Adriano Pedrosa insists, using Freud’s theories, that we all, no matter our location, are always profoundly foreign to each other. Bourlez examines the ideological and aesthetic implications of this standpoint, by taking a closer look at the relation between the “disturbing strangeness” of oneself, the otherness of the outside, and the strangeness of the etymology of the word “queer.” Intertwining Foucault’s, Blanchot’s and Deleuze’s theories amongst others, Bourlez offers some thought provoking examples of how artists, psychoanalysts and activists offer “an exit from overdetermined imaginations,” and how they welcome and work with the imaginary in order to disrupt, transform, and re- or decompose the order of the world.
Peter Jansson's text, ”Homo psychologicus, or the fascination and captivation of the imaginary,” is an attempt to shed light on Lacan's concept of the imaginary order. The imaginary, grounded in the theory of the mirror stage, shows how the ego is formed in a dialectical mirror relationship with the other. Against this background – that our understanding of ourselves is characterised by a narcissistic, alienating, and imaginary structure – Jansson illustrates how our preoccupation with AI and robots simply bears witness to how we recognize ourselves in our imaginary bodies.
If the sublime is what makes imagination confront its limits, what are the limits of capitalism in a society that only supports art that doesn’t terrify it? In an essay on imagination and the sublime, the Brazilian philosopher and psychoanalyst Vladimir Safatle claims that art dealing with the sublime should have no place in the security regime of advanced capitalism. However he encounters a phenomenon in contemporary art that he chooses to call ”capitalist sublime,” a “safe art that can bring a sublime that no longer disorients us.” Safatle offers a way out through a deactivation of “libidinal colonialism,” a separation that requires knowing how to separate the productive forces from their subjection to the relations of production, which aim to perpetuate the fetischistic fascination with the existing.
In an interview about the ecology of the brain conducted by the Norwegian philosopher Anders Dunker with the artist and theorist Warren Neidich, the latter suggests that in cognitive capitalism, where the mind and brain are the new factories of the 21st century, digitality has teamed up with neuroscience to create a neural-digital entanglement of which deep learning artificial neural networks are but one example, with grave consequences for our freedom of thought. Combining Jean-Pierre Changeux theories of neural plasticity with Bernard Stiegler's ideas of the technically driven organogenesis resulting in our anthropocenic brains, Neidich creates an alternative resistant paradigm he refers to as an “eco-cenic brain,” sculpted by the technologies which adhere to the philosophy of deep ecology that are benevolent and in harmony with nature, rather than malevolent and exploitative towards it.
Jacques Lacan came to define paranoia as a “disease of the imagination.” In an essay that deconstructs the myths around Freud’s famous sentence “they don’t know that we’re bringing them the plague,” French psychoanalyst Anouck Cape offers a thrilleresque analysis of how Lacan might have contributed to this myth, how Dalí’s “paranoid drawings” came to influence Lacan’s thesis on paranoia as well as Lacan came to influence Dalí’s works, trying finally to understand why psychoanalysis as a practice and theory has such difficulty freeing itself from these tutelary, overarching masters.
When most people hear of the pathologies of power, they immediately think of monstrous exceptions such as Caligula or Nero, Stalin or Hitler, who still haunt our imaginary. In reality the phenomenon is very common. Power functions as a magnifying mirror that amplifies our character traits and reveals our hidden desires. This is just one of the mechanisms described by the Romanian writer Theodor Paleologu in his coming book on the pathologies of power, of which we publish the introduction, full of anecdotes gathered by the writer who is both a political theorist and a practitioner.
Ben Eastham, writer and editor of e-flux criticism takes part in this issue of Paletten with a text about a man who’s lying on a bench, looking at the stars and writing about what he sees and thinks, a mind-expanding journey into his imaginary.
In the Écrits, Jacques Lacan stresses on the importance of the distinction between desire and drive, a distinction which is essential for the institution of psychoanalysis, as well as the role of the analyst in therapeutic processes. The philosopher and creator of Philosophy Portal Cadell Last takes a closer look at the Écrits and wonders what they can tell us today, in relation to the explosive acceleration of global technocapitalism mediated by algorithmic digitalisation.. Lacan’s Écrits is according to Cadell no longer simply a book that teaches us about the analytic clinic, but increasingly, a book that forces us to consider the role of analytic knowledge, on the level of social, technological and political movements that seem to require philosophers who are psychoanalytically informed.
In her essay “The Abyss of Narcissism,” philosopher and literature professor Carin Franzén explores the first turn towards introspection in Western history, demonstrating what an early modern moralist such as La Rochefoucauld, and his analysis of self-love as an abyss and imaginary trickster, could bring to an understanding of narcissism as resistance towards an engulfing neoliberal culture.
Who is guilty? What is the imaginary father? Who hates their country? Who loves it? In an essay about imaginary fathers and the function of identification, philosopher Cecilia Sjöholm writes an essay about terrorism and nationalism. In the 1980’s German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta made a film that problematized precisely how and why the nation can become an object of identification, or disidentification: The German Sisters (1981). Inspired by the life and fate of Gudrun Ensslin, one of the founders of the RAF, and the relation to her journalist sister, it is also a film about the dialectics between terrorism and a national imaginary.
The critical program governing Western thought since the second half of the 18th century has reached its point of no return. What was once perhaps a formidable instrument of intellectual and political emancipation has turned into a prison for thought, destroying the possibility of reinventing a world crumbling on its foundation. We need to get rid of it – and create another one. But which one and how? In his forthcoming book “Superfaible” (Superweak), Belgian philosopher Laurent de Sutter arrives at the conclusion that we have become super strong, too strong. Superpower is the contemporary condition of the human being. Sutter creates all kind of acrobatic connections between real and imaginary forces and wonders: “Who today, except an idiot or a simpleton, would dare to say that he is not critical? That he or she does not have a critical mind?” Sutter takes a post-critical look at the modern critical reason in order to look at what it left out – namely the future.
Art curator Joanna Warsza’s essay “An Imaginary Playground” is a speculative exploration of the crossroads between art and play since both of them strive for a removal of ourselves from a situation, for a re-contextualization, but also for being guided by imaginary rules. It walks us through different artists’ ideas for playgrounds as testing sites of how societies re-invent and re-imagine themselves. Because it is here that the tensions between rules and freedom, the familiar and the unknown, borders and transgression, or risk and security can be constantly negotiated. Finally “An Imaginary Playground” leads to a multidirectional and multigenerational Spielplatz which enables a hide and seek, a beach ball game, a tribute to collective intelligence, and a flirt to be performed at the same time.
In relation to the work with the group exhibition Draw a door in the wall and slip through it, curated by Swedish artist Astrid Kajsa Nylander at Belenius in Stockholm, Cathrin Mayer and Nylander discuss the dynamics and stakes of decision-making that shapes curatorial and painting processes, but also processes in art education.
The french artist Aurelie Galois has written an essay about the suspicion that hovers over those that consider sexuality to be an important thing to engage with. Reflecting on Bataille, Hannah Arendt, Pascal Quignard, the sex-utopist writer and editor Yannick Haenel that recently did an enquiry about french writer’s increasingly fear and incapacity to write about sex Galois writes also about the reactions to her last exhibition, where she showed erotic miniatures hidden in jewellery boxes titled Bijoux indiscrets as a tribute to the erotic novel published clandestinely by Denis Diderot in 1748.
With the help of Witold Gombrowicz, Tomas Tranströmer, Andrej Tarkovskij and Carl Fredrik Hill, Rita Kristola examines the Imago’s relationship of the self to its artistic expression. Here, the imagination, which is characterised by a self-written logic and tone, plays an important role. While the creative self is dependent on the imagination, some of the works show that this identification between the self and the created is not always productive but can also lead to blind loneliness.
Mikhail Lylov has written an essay about Jumana Manna’s artistic work in relation to concepts of geophilosophy. The notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, ground and foundation, depth, distance and infrastructure provide an interpretive angle to engage Manna’s practice in conjunction with the critical interrogation of the romanticist imagination. Manna’s work, the geopoetics of her films and sculptural series advance a particular conceptual perspective. It favours earth, land and geography rather than the principles of historical necessity for the elements of political optics.
In A Goddess Manifesto Oxana Timofeeva offers an essay about female power, violence, rapists, victims, christian culture, guilt, polygamy, matriarchy, pagan orgies, group marriage in primitive communism, russian poetry, Isadora Duncan, Freud’s abandonment of his theory of seduction, personal and prehistoric truths, men’s don juan lists looking for numbers and concludes, Lacan’s definition of the act of love as “the polymorphous perversion of the male”, the other enjoyment that lies beyond the Phallus and the capacity of women’s enjoyment beyond organs, that is her capacity of living and enjoying like Gods, or better even – Goddesses.
In this Paletten issue we’re also presenting new works that deal with the imaginary by the artists Tova Mozard and Marthe Ramm Fortun.
Have a great imaginary trip through our imaginary dis-orders and re-orderings of the disorder.
Sinziana Ravini and the editors
Front cover: Vi skal ikke lage lærebøker, Marthe Ramm Fortun, Bergen, 2024.
Photo: Sinziana Ravini. © Marthe Ramm Forthun/BONO.