Remembering Petit-Jean

‘One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean…pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply, it glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”’
– Jacques Lacan

Let’s start with Jacques Lacan. That dead French philosopher, hard enough to read in French, harder still in translation; linguistic clarity and subtleties lost in lumbered franglo phrasing. So much so Žižek (the living) has written a ‘How To’ English-language reader, his contribution to a cottage industry that raises the veil, gets to the point – perhaps makes Lacan’s points for him. Taught that no self-respecting student relies on crib notes* (for that’s what these are), I persist with Lacan, the real, a list of confounding questions growing, but my inclination to pitch my own entry point to his postulates on psychoanalysis and associated philosophising, waning. Instead, I find myself turning my attention to the man, trying to understand him, as if he were my analysand – intrigued, concerned by his oft alluded-to lack, his ever present desires, distress. It dawns on me our vast differences; deduce that time, sex and socio-economic status necessarily determines differentiated interpretations, no less on key scenes from his seminal work on ‘the gaze’, second only in importance to his theory on 'the mirror stage'.

So I raise the topic of the gaze with a friend, to gauge its currency as a conversation starter. She’s taken aback, not sure we still talk about ‘the gays’, you know, what they’re wearing, where they’re cruising, as if ‘they’ were a thing to begin with. Spelling it out, she’s no less perplexed. Even with my pop-psychology explanation, her eyes did that other thing – the anti-gaze – they glazed over. I probed further, trying the story of the sardine can on other friends, the reaction going one of two ways: either met with – you can’t be serious, is this what you lot (philosophers) debate – or with a certain tickled, humoured knowingness. The humoured knowingness – much like my own reaction – is one that, not without its pretensions, reveres Petit-Jean our fisher-philosopher, finds the sublime in the sardine can’s affronting simplicity, and accepts the insignificance of the I; whether the I is in fact the you, the me, Lacan, or whoever it happens to be on the receiving end of ‘the joke’, in order to revel in the scene, relax into the moment and find in it some kind of reassuring return.

I don’t mean to diminish the seriousness with which I’ve approached Lacan’s work, but it’s true to say the sardine can speaks to me with a relevance, that the remainder of his contribution, though noted, can’t. I must confess an inability to fully understand his efforts on the ‘four fundamentals’: that is Freud’s four fundamentals of ‘the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive’ around which he developed his theses for a 1964 lecture series at the École pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Born into a late 20th century knowledge structure at a time of rapid information deployment and hyper self-centredness, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that the ‘Grandfather of psychoanalysis’ and his pioneering case studies, as well as the works of his mid-20th century disciples, feel dated and a little laboured to me. A modern woman with the good fortune of being deposited into a framework of pre-existing analytic vocabulary – for which I duly credit Freud, Lacan et al – I’m much more ‘where now’ than ‘how did we get here’. It’s an approach. I don’t claim it’s the only or best approach.

I’m aware that dealing with a translation of a transcript of an oral presentation I should be forgiving and prepared to give the text a second (third?), closer read, but when dealing in fundamentals, I picture a certain pursuit of clarity on the part of the author, so find it surprising that there’s nothing resembling a bullet point in 276 pages of exposition. Still, when Lacan thinks, writes, reveals his thoughts, he is necessarily exposing and subsequently exposed. Reading between the lines, this process reveals something of an individual’s unconscious. For this reason I respect the risk taken by creatives, who are left vulnerable, open to assessment, inadvertently granting access to their uncensored self, contained in and betrayed by subtext. In Lacan’s telling of the story in which Petit-Jean is protagonist, we catch a glimpse of his anxieties. By focusing on his fish-out-of-water feeling, I fear he misses the richness in the scene and subsequently the opportunity Petit-Jean presents him with, to close the gap, both between them, and for him, to find himself and be one.

A peril of the canon is to face constant criticism, but despite my critique, I know full well ‘oneness’ isn’t easy. I harbour the feeling, and attendant guilt, of having sat on my brother in utero. But these nine months of phantastical foetal dominance are invalidated by reality. My brother is in fact the older sibling; bigger than me, smarter than me, he earns more money, has a wife, two kids, a mortgage, and a rather silly dog. It’s in twinning with him and separating from him, that my responsibility begins. Lacan highlights a common trait in Freud’s unconscious – which whether exposed through dream, parapraxis (a Freudian slip) or spontaneous wit – its ‘sense of impediment’, is key to its function, its potential as ‘discovery…of exceptional value.’ In this uncharted territory of the gap, where lack and desire congregate in contest, value may well be exceptional, but any discovery is to risk a potentially painful awakening, for which we’d no doubt like some other to be responsible.

From the moment of conception, that initial ‘coming together’, we experience separation. Cells duplicating, umbilicus cutting, mirror reflecting. Add to that Lacan’s chrysalis split in psychoanalytical development, which ‘invented by a solitary, an incontestable theoretician of the unconscious…is now practised in couples’. No longer both analyst and analysand, incapable of finding the cohesive self through self-reflection, we’re virtually programmed to delegate, outsourcing in keeping with a theory of ‘two’, a not unimportant stage, on which I’ll expand... We meet with a mirror and see an image, a reflection, a representation creating two: a self, and a self-image. We perceive a doubling in our number and stature – a dangerous derangement at too early an age to understand this unquenchable gaze that drinks in our image, feeds our ego, but leaves us with the hangover of an unshakeable otherness. An eventual coupling with something, someone ‘real’ as a result, a ‘real other’ at the very least, is to urgently pursue a ‘mirage of truth’, which is an improvement on, and possibly the best we can hope for after this initial, integral schism.

There’s no organ like the eye to affect our own otherness. Lacan uses the example: ‘I see myself seeing myself’ to reinforce its distancing effect. In comparison ‘I warm myself warming myself’ is corporal, whole, one. The eye and its perceptive function positions it both of us and outside us at once. In that it’s outside us, it’s open to manipulation and the influence of the public. Its being ‘in public’ and no longer of our private, discrete domain, it’s liable to adopt judgemental, self-conscious attributes. There is no longer our eye, our gaze, but the gaze of others – others’ eyes everywhere, even in our own mind’s eye. All this looking and being looked at renders the subject in a state of suspension. ‘From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it…’ and so starts the dance of the marionette, metaphorical strings attached. Without physical form, we cannot compare the gaze to other objects we’ve learnt to desire, we can’t buy, manipulate, dominate or discard it. Lacan says: ‘Of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependence in the register of desire, the gaze is specified as unapprehensible.’ We can try to comprehend and contain the gaze by seeing our-self seeing our-self, but try as we might, our focal point will continuously shift. Like a dog chasing its tail, we only end up running circles.

A young, energised Lacan took off on a journey to give it a go – who of us hasn’t tried? ‘It’s a true story. I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at the sea.’ He finds himself in a boat off the Northwest coast of France, one half of a classic, comedic odd-couple. Lacan and Petit-Jean – what a pair!

Lacan goes looking for danger, willing to take risks in order to share in the excitement of a life he has romanticised; the realities of labour clearly foreign to him. The first hint of his anxiety comes in an aside about his companion: ‘Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class.’ ‘That’ social class. Different to, no doubt lower than his, he’s focused from the first on Petit-Jean’s otherness, which only heightens his own discomfort. Already threatened, it’s impossible for Lacan to take the sardine can to the same conclusion I do, to see it in the same light. He admits: ‘the fact [Petit-Jean] found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that…[I] looked like nothing on earth’ and ‘rather out of place’. His judgement of Petit-Jean, the transference of guilt, blinds him to the humour and possibility to be in the moment. Lacan complains: ‘But I am not in the picture.’ His admission betraying a lack he cannot bridge by desire alone. Trying to control the situation and wrangle it into a framework he understands, he fails to grasp Petit-Jean’s gesture. When Petit Jean points to the sardine can floating past the boat, glittering in the sun and says: ‘You see that can? Do you see it? Well it doesn’t see you!’ I rather interpret it as his giving Lacan permission (fisherman to fisherman) to really be there with him, to chill the f*** out, and less as a psychoanalytic jibe over which to obsess.

Lacan being Lacan is at sea in this scenario. He’s in Sartre’s park. He’s not alone, and he doesn’t like it. ‘The depth of field’ he says, ‘with all its ambiguity and variability…is in no way mastered by me.’ Petit-Jean, the sardine can, they’ve thrown him off-centre. But the error is his. The need for mastery is a trap, a trick, which ego aside, lacks any real meaning. Lacan’s ‘colophon of doubt’ reinforces the Freudian extension of Descartes’ cogito: ‘I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I am.’ It’s his doubt that creates ‘the stain, the spot’, and he emerges from the shadows in true intellectual fashion with theories that do little more than distract. The paradox is, this white noise widens the gap between him and Petit-Jean; Lacan falls victim to his own theory: ‘In so far as the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolise this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration, and in so far as it is an objet a reduced, of its nature, to a punctiform, evanescent function, it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance, an ignorance so characteristic of all progress in thought that occurs in the way constituted by philosophical research.’

So less philosophising? Or a new philosophy?
At least let me retell the story...

Once upon a time we were one. Some time passed. Then came what now seems a quaint 20th century concern that we are in fact two, that the point from which we yearn for return is from the binary, the dual (man/woman, heaven/earth, good/bad). Today, in the 21st century, the issue is I am all too often everywhere, all at once. If the additional image of the mirror stage broke down the self into binary component parts: mind/body, self/image, presentation/representation, what of the self now we look, see and perceive ourselves in all manner of spatial and temporal locations at the same time, all the time? The world is awash with my image, a multiplicity of me swamping any coherent sense of my self. We’re everywhere and nowhere, we’re self-aware and self-conscious. Polyoptic, we’re all-knowing seers with the subsequent, myriad responsibilities. But as it’s all puffery, it’s no wonder we’re failing. Dismally.

Whereas once the philosopher drew the conscious on an adventure into the unconscious, today we’re tasked with bringing relief to a people (I’d say the West, but that’s too limiting, because data/bits have bifurcated globally) that for the most part exist in a supra-conscious space. All I want, given the impracticality in seven-plus billion of being by myself, is an opportunity to be with myself, to find a moment of insignificance among the hubbub. Those moments that remind me it’s not on me.

Were I in that boat with Petit-Jean, I would have taken his words and that singular moment of the waves, sun and lone sardine can in all its glittering glory, and let it float on by. I probably would have laughed a little to myself, nothing gregarious – then sensed the return – the relief that I could be here and here alone, and that there was nothing in the world that was needed from me, nor that I could do, to make any lick of difference.

Rather than drawing its attention to me, it serves to bring me back, to notice the natural – the waves, the horizon, the sublime – situating me, dwarfing me so much I forget misguided imperatives and elevated self-importance and reconfigure my smallness as the needing to be nothing but one. Lacan in comparison is on high alert, already exposed as an other in relief with Petit-Jean’s otherness. The irony is, it’s Lacan’s distancing look that creates the provocation and results in the threat of and need for an exchange in order to engage. ‘The world is all-seeing, but it is not exhibitionistic – it does not provoke our gaze. When it begins to provoke it, the feeling of strangeness begins too.’ The ‘who started it’ cycle begins, and Lacan fears he’ll be left hanging in an unmet gaze exchange like Sartre’s ‘point of nothingness where I am’. In comparison, Lacan favours a proactive grasping, an attainment of the gaze exchange that forces the other, or the object, to participate. But what would have happened that day if the sardine can had looked back?

If the sardine can saw me, it would accuse. A look after all is hardly ever free from judgement, expectation. And so begins the whirlpool: should I fish the can out of the sea to reuse? Recycle? Should I pre-empt the future of fishing – an unsustainable growth industry – and warn Petit-Jean that small-scale operators will soon be put out of business by super-trawlers? Should I question my moral position as carnivore, my distance from the realities of the catching, killing, transporting, canning, disposing. Should I deride human behaviour, its consumption, waste and adverse impact on the planet?

Or do I accept this instance of the sardine can fashioned as stupa, rock cairn – a punctuation in the landscape? All across the vast mountains and plains of Central Asia and beyond, you find a human trail of meditative breaks that bring greater attention still to the surrounding, sublime landscape. Four, five, six small stones in a balanced pile, here, there, bring you into that moment, in to nature, to look at it, be in it, recognise in its expanse, that you are allowed to be small, adequate in your ability to only ever do justice to one. If we recognise and allow the sublime to overwhelm our emotions, we neutralise the self. If Freud’s to be believed, men don’t deal well with ‘neutering’, equating it with castration. But for the rest of us, or for everyone dealing now, with the more pressing issue of an over-abundance of knowledge, responsibility, and an obliteration of the self into myriad – sometimes schizophrenically incongruent – representations, it serves to at least put us back together. Neutral, now, is nothing to fear. We need to return to that space so we can begin again and do better this time.

When I need to, I think of China, and everything is ok. China is a mess. Polluted, epic, incredible. I can’t do anything about China. China has no interest in me. Sometimes I go to the coast and look at the ocean. Waves, walls of water, do what they will. They’re refreshingly unconstrained and from time to time demonstrate their destructive disinterestedness. When I see the ocean, I am on my own, not lonely, but one, with my self.

In a video from 2015 on the Guardian website, sculptor/artist Antony Gormley is filmed walking through Kings Cross, London, an area once home to a number of squats used by artists as studio space. Pointing to a building he once worked from he says: ‘22 artists worked there for nearly seven years, entirely free, how things have changed.’ He bemoans the city’s rampant commercial development that’s outpricing artists, students and the necessary ‘fresh blood’ needed to keep a city multi-faceted and moving forward culturally. I can testify to the truth in this claim. A city of 8.6 million, competition and consumerism is rife, capitalism is king and with leaf-free trees three-quarters of the year and a grey, working city river there’s little to stop you getting swept up in it all. As Gormley’s prospects improved, the artist commissioned a purpose built studio where his criteria for the architect were: ‘light, space, silence’, elements just short of the miraculous in central London. Lucky for him. For the rest of us, Gormley performs a community service, drawing attention to the key feature the city still shares which encompasses all three. Describing his art in the video as ‘a catalyst for making people aware of how extraordinary their lives are already’ his 2007 exhibition, Event Horizon, positioned life-sized casts: ‘indexical copies of my body…[which] in their displacement of air, indicate the space of “any” body; a human space within space at large.’ The bodies, installed on building tops across the city of London and staged later in cities like Sao Paulo, Hong Kong and New York, and in the Austrian Alps, created ‘acupuncture points…[that]… ask us to attend...’

‘Through the agency of this body I will become aware of the sky.’

Gormley hoped that through ‘this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one [would] perhaps re-assesses one's own position in the world and become aware of one's status of embedment.’

And the first place in which we are embedded is in us, our bodies.

The sardine can, rock cairns and Gormley’s statues all draw attention to the natural environment, that expansive place where one’s individual nature is its most apparent. Rather than overwhelming, the sublime reduces the need for the subterfuge of knowing and the responsibility of doing something with that knowledge; creating space for humour and non-knowing. Along with the rapid multiplication of images and diminution in their value in the late 20th and early 21st century, information and subsequently the virility knowledge, has suffered a similar fate. There is now all this stuff we know. Stacks of it. I could say on the one hand, I know more than Socrates: I know the earth is round, e=mc2, the lyrics to Ice-Ice Baby, and who killed Laura Palmer. You couldn’t disagree. Nor would Socrates, modestly admitting: ‘I know that I know nothing’. But my knowledge is a ruse. What I know lacks body, teeth, and other transmogrifying features. More valuable right now would be a shift in focus onto what Sarat Maharaj calls ‘avidya’, Sanskrit for non-knowledge or ‘productive confusion’ and to accept that without the stages of contemplation and self-discovery, my broad but cursory general knowledge won’t stand up to prosecution. In Anthony Huberman’s 2009 artist book – a collection of the non-knowing, titled: For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, he references the cabinet of curiosities as an example of non-knowing ‘[once,] people simply enjoyed the experience of not knowing and not understanding’, but in the demystified world of wikipedia, their effect is diminished, their wares, dusty. Opportunity to stop and reflect in a fast world now to be found in the form of grandiose artworks like those by Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapour whose vision and budgets combine to awe the individual.

Olafur Eliasson, describing his works on his website as bringing ‘body consciousness’ through manipulation of a person’s journey and orientation in the spaces he creates. He’s interested in subjectivity and sensation, personal qualities of a present, embodied self. For Olafur Eliasson Studio colleague, Anna Engberg-Pederson, the new utopia is a wunderkammer that operates like a miniature parliament: ‘a place intended for people to get together and negotiate the conditions for thought.’ Free from the sameness (an imposition) of a modernist utopia, the difference is in diversity and scale and the delegation of discussion ‘to each household, university, city or society’. The line between body-consciousness and self-consciousness is crucial to maintain, and works like The Blind Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 2003) Din blinde passager (ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, 2010) and The Weather Project (Tate Modern, London, 2003) tread a fine line. Self-consciousness risks an unhealthy heightening and conglomeration of all our anxieties, whereas a body-consciousness is a proactive pursuit akin to the philosophy of Georges Bataille who: ‘active in Surrealist circles in Paris in the post-war period…pushed the limits of decency and resisted the oppressiveness of moral idealism. At the core of his work was his total embrace of the experience of not-knowing, and while [Alfred] Jarry considered it a cause for laughter, Bataille would go further and claim that to not-know would be to experience the religious and the sublime. He would call this thing, non-knowledge, using the term that places not-knowing inside the fabric of knowledge, not outside of or in contradiction to it.’

In other words, get over yourself.

To be swayed by the sublime, to be moved by the humourous, is to be open, a little less serious, and free. ‘As different as they may seem, humour has much in common with the sublime…they both construct a rupture between expectation and comprehension.’ It’s a valuable space – personal space – on a crowded planet. Lacan gets there, later, remember he’s in his early twenties** in that boat off Brittany. But it’s a ‘higher’ art that does it for him. It’s in painting he says that the painter ‘offers his picture to be seen – has a relation with the gaze. This relation is not, as it might at first seem, that of being a trap for the gaze. It might be thought that, like the actor, the painter wishes to be looked at. I do not think so. I think there is a relation with the gaze of the spectator, but that it is more complex. The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus – ‘You want to see? Well, take a look at this!’

He goes on: ‘[the painter] invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying…’

So why does a painting bring him peace, when the sardine can was the source of such discomfort. I dare say at the time, Petit-Jean’s sardine can was too conceptual for the young Parisien of Jesuit schooling. Petit-Jean, like his contemporary Duchamp, who around the same time was trying to exhibit his Fountain (R. Mutt 1917) and promote his ‘ready-mades’, was before his time and misunderstood. The second edition of Duchamp’s journal, The Blindman, published in May 1917 records the jurors’ refusal of his work for exhibition in The Society of Independent Artists’ show. In the satirical article that follows, the title: ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ alludes to an object worthy of meditation and reflection. Author Louise Norton writes: ‘to any “innocent” eye how pleasant is its chaste simplicity of line and colour! “Like a lovely Buddha” someone said’. But to the jurors, ‘the object was irrevocably associated in their atavistic minds with a certain natural function of a secretive sort.’ She reports that: ‘many of us had quite an exorbitant notion of the independence of the Independents. It was a sad surprise to learn of a Board of Censors sitting upon the ambiguous question, What is ART?’ Though there were still a few decades of deliberation to come, by the 1960s it was decided. By then, Duchamp was revered as a game changer, and Lacan was well and truly ensconced in the École.

Now it’s possible I’ve missed a trick, and Louise Norton is Marcel Duchamp, and Petit-Jean, Jacques Lacan. I watched Fight Club to the end, and didn’t get that Brad Pitt was Edward Norton’s alter-ego, so it’s highly possible. In which case, I’ve most likely misconstrued Lacan’s parable of the sardine can beyond all proportion. But that’s art right. I could either write nothing, or something, and I chose to write. It’s the activation of the space, the embodiment of energy. That, is ART.



*Žižek, S. (2006) How To Read Lacan, Granta Books, London
Ok, so on completing my essay, I took a sneaky peak at the introduction to Žižek’s Lacan reader to see if I could find anything to defend my essay. I was buoyed to find the following: 1. ‘For Lacan, pyschoanalysis at its most fundamental is not a theory and technique of treating psychic disturbances, but a theory and practice that confronts individuals with the most radical dimension of human existence…’ 2. ‘The most outstanding feature of his teaching is permanent self-questioning…’ 3. ‘It is part of the Lacanian theory that every truth is partial…’ 4. ‘By cutting himself off from the decaying corpse of the International Psycho-Analytic Association, Lacan kept the Freudian teaching alive. Fifty years later it is up to us to the same…’ And so it is I have Žižek’s permission to make my departure.

**Born 1901, if Lacan was 21 in that boat, that puts the year around 1922 – five years after Duchamp attempted to exhibit his first ready made, but still many years before they were met with any type of acceptance as ‘art’.