"Taken from here to where it came from
And taken to a place
And used in such a manner that can only remain as
A representation of what it was where it came from"
Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Art Wing
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Emaré, Lines 85-97
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The cloth was dysplayed sone;
The Emperour lokede therupone
And myght hyt not se,
For glysteryng of the ryche ston;
Redy syght had he non,
And sayde, "How may thys be?"
The Emperour sayde on hygh,
"Sertes, thys ys a fayry,
Or ellys a vanyté!"
The Kyng of Cysyle answered than,
"So ryche a jwell ys ther non
In all Crystyanté."
Art is an act of forgetting. We attend to a text-object and in doing so retreat everything else connected to it or "below the surface" into the background. The Art becomes a representation of what has become forgotten, discarded, and removed. And yet there is no escape from networks and there is no word outside of the whole field of signification; in fact what brings the Art to life and sustains it is the abjected processes in the background. It is the specters in and outside the text which we do not attend to that produces the Art as excess. We only ever actively see a sliver of reality, but in recognizing the passive queer specters at work, we may become tuned into the object's unknown reality.
In the Medieval Breton lay Emaré, a master-crafted dress is made and remade using a variety of rare gemstones to narrate a variety of scenes alluding to the diverse histories of the garment before being remade again and given to Emare who wears it and becomes, the text tells us, an object of such beauty that others struggle to look at her directly. These gems, the garment and its wearer, all become text-objects and works of art which are pulled from their original networks, which are then forgotten in the background, but which serve to spectrally animate the objects from within and without; alluring us with hints of sublime or retreating objective interiority.
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I. The Text-Object
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I. The Text-Object
Art is an act of Framing, and Framing is an act of Forgetting. In a previous post on Romeo + Juliet, I discussed how naming serves to draw our attention to a specific area (place in time and space; and intensity) of a network while not necessarily removing this named-network-part from interacting ecologies. What is called naming there, could very well be considered a general practice of art forming (if we think in terms of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing). An object becomes removed from its environment, if only in our minds, by becoming drawn to our attention. Like Heidegger's distinction between the ready-at-hand and the present-at-hand objects, this stepping forth of the object by being framed as significant, brings it life for us in new ways. It may not even be a human actant that frames the object for us, it may be the objects own enticing qualities or other mediators which cause us to attend.
In Emaré the gem stones are unearthed by workers and are purchased by dealers, by craftsmen, then finally changes hands several times as the garment which it is ebedded in changes time and time again. In becoming Gem, the stones of the earth along with all the workers are forgotten. In becoming a part of the Garment, the gem is forgotten until it is momentarily made a representation of its type and history. The Garment itself is framed by its use and re-use, until it is eventually framed as part of Emaré's person. Of course, Emaré herself becomes framed as Art by wearing the garment as well. As we move out attention from person, to human, to clothes, the scenes, to gems, to workers, to stones, to lands of origin certain things are brought forth while the others fade into the background, still at work.
In Emaré the gem stones are unearthed by workers and are purchased by dealers, by craftsmen, then finally changes hands several times as the garment which it is ebedded in changes time and time again. In becoming Gem, the stones of the earth along with all the workers are forgotten. In becoming a part of the Garment, the gem is forgotten until it is momentarily made a representation of its type and history. The Garment itself is framed by its use and re-use, until it is eventually framed as part of Emaré's person. Of course, Emaré herself becomes framed as Art by wearing the garment as well. As we move out attention from person, to human, to clothes, the scenes, to gems, to workers, to stones, to lands of origin certain things are brought forth while the others fade into the background, still at work.
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II. The Art of Forgetting
Having been so pulled forward as a wonder to our senses, we may then physically remove the object from its current network or create an imitation of the object in order to represent our experience of a particular framing of the world. Thus what art "is" in this sense, is a manner of observation which allows us to see more in a specific way/place while causing us to forget other things. The other things do not totally disappear, but become background, marginal, distant, and in a sense spectral. They exist but not as a priority. We may begin to assume that they don't matter or even interfere with our experience of text/art/object which we have framed. Like listening to the recording of an opera at home, mounting a photograph of a landscape, going to a zoo, eating only the green M&Ms, reading a book, throwing away the wrapper of a candy bar, stereotyping a stranger, or moving the homeless to other cities, we "clean up" what we see by picking out what we want and disposing of the rest.
The story of Emaré is in many senses a story about abjection. By the bejeweled cloth's arrival we are already encouraged to have forgotten the geological and human labor (not to mention the animal labor) that went into this brilliant piece of art's production. The unearthing of this past is in a sense one of Marx's central methods. The cloth's position as object mediator for the "Sultan of Emir" from whom it is taken as booty in war, is forgotten and further erased by its reconstruction into a dress from Emaré. When the impenetrable beauty of Emaré is combined with the dazzling surface of the dress, she becomes an Art object which while desired cannot be easily looked at. She becomes (as a psychoanalytic reading may suggest) the Sublime Object of Ideology. She is the Other which is searched for and desired, but is ever out of reach. While she is the central figure of the story, Emaré herself seems to exist as a specter which haunts the text. For all the action she incites, she can be forgotten as a live agent.
The story of Emaré is in many senses a story about abjection. By the bejeweled cloth's arrival we are already encouraged to have forgotten the geological and human labor (not to mention the animal labor) that went into this brilliant piece of art's production. The unearthing of this past is in a sense one of Marx's central methods. The cloth's position as object mediator for the "Sultan of Emir" from whom it is taken as booty in war, is forgotten and further erased by its reconstruction into a dress from Emaré. When the impenetrable beauty of Emaré is combined with the dazzling surface of the dress, she becomes an Art object which while desired cannot be easily looked at. She becomes (as a psychoanalytic reading may suggest) the Sublime Object of Ideology. She is the Other which is searched for and desired, but is ever out of reach. While she is the central figure of the story, Emaré herself seems to exist as a specter which haunts the text. For all the action she incites, she can be forgotten as a live agent.
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III. Creating Specters
For students of language, particularly of deconstruction, this distinguishing of one object, or text, as different logically requires the deferral of meaning onto a whole field of signifiers which the word marks the absence. This play of signification/association among the peripheries carries the force of meaning into and out from the text-object invoked. Thus while all other signifiers are forgotten, they not only remain active in the background but like the strings of a puppet, animate the attended text and bring it to life.
Carla Freccero in Queer/Early/Modern makes a similar argument regarding the abjected bodies of queers. The specters of the forgotten haunt the attended, normified bodies, pass through and around them, marking these bodies attempts at stable forms with failure and excess. Even in our attempts to see and identify the queer, we fail (as discussed in the previous post on Punk) because the queer can only ever disturb identity. Thus we cannot ever actively "attend" to queerness, but we may be aware of its presence, passively, as it moves through the peripheries of our vision, moving, disturbing, and transforming the text-object; bringing it perpetually to new life, like its breath moving in and out and around its body. She employs Foucault extensively in her argument, and presence may in fact here be linked with Foucault's concepts of power and knowledge which can only ever be enacted but not contained in totality likes facts or possessions in a secure vault somewhere, waiting to be opened and used. The reality of Art objects, like persons, is queer in our ability to encounter it. It perpetually disturbs what we can see and remains active beyond our powers to attend to it and thus stabilize it into coherent, readable knowledge. Of course, to do so, would be to entomb the text-objects, yet another manner of abjection, forgetting, and covering-over.
Thus we may see Emaré's wandering voyage, as a manner of perpetually moving just as others begin to approach her, gestures to her position as the queer spectral object of the text; arriving at her as a destination is an encounter which is ever differed/disturbed from its totality. Recasting her identity, having lies told about her, working perpetually through servants, kings, suitors, and even enemies Emaré's agency is active through her powers of slipping around in and altering networks of signification, objects, and power. Whether seen as an object of desire or a death-threat, Emaré's presence exceeds what she reveals. Why she is so sign-ificant is never fully evident even for the reader and perhaps for this reason the text begs to be read as somehow being representational. The specters of significance reveal their presence through the mystery of the art.
Carla Freccero in Queer/Early/Modern makes a similar argument regarding the abjected bodies of queers. The specters of the forgotten haunt the attended, normified bodies, pass through and around them, marking these bodies attempts at stable forms with failure and excess. Even in our attempts to see and identify the queer, we fail (as discussed in the previous post on Punk) because the queer can only ever disturb identity. Thus we cannot ever actively "attend" to queerness, but we may be aware of its presence, passively, as it moves through the peripheries of our vision, moving, disturbing, and transforming the text-object; bringing it perpetually to new life, like its breath moving in and out and around its body. She employs Foucault extensively in her argument, and presence may in fact here be linked with Foucault's concepts of power and knowledge which can only ever be enacted but not contained in totality likes facts or possessions in a secure vault somewhere, waiting to be opened and used. The reality of Art objects, like persons, is queer in our ability to encounter it. It perpetually disturbs what we can see and remains active beyond our powers to attend to it and thus stabilize it into coherent, readable knowledge. Of course, to do so, would be to entomb the text-objects, yet another manner of abjection, forgetting, and covering-over.
Thus we may see Emaré's wandering voyage, as a manner of perpetually moving just as others begin to approach her, gestures to her position as the queer spectral object of the text; arriving at her as a destination is an encounter which is ever differed/disturbed from its totality. Recasting her identity, having lies told about her, working perpetually through servants, kings, suitors, and even enemies Emaré's agency is active through her powers of slipping around in and altering networks of signification, objects, and power. Whether seen as an object of desire or a death-threat, Emaré's presence exceeds what she reveals. Why she is so sign-ificant is never fully evident even for the reader and perhaps for this reason the text begs to be read as somehow being representational. The specters of significance reveal their presence through the mystery of the art.
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IV. Ghosts in the Machine
Of course the spectral queerness is not simply external to the attended text/art/object but are a key element of its interiority. Like the Other located inside the Subject, or the Trace located inside the signifier, there is a Blank located inside Text as articulated by Iser Wolfgang in his article on the "Interaction Between Text and Reader." What this amounts to is that in attending to the object, we come to recognize that we cannot see "beyond the surface," and this ambiguity of the text allows for it to have many potential trajectories, thus freeing it from deterministic frames which we might like to place on it. It is the fact that the fork that picks up food may also be a back-scratcher, or the word fork which may also be split in the road, and that this interiority is what frees it from the straight metonymic chain of meaning, cause and effect. It is this interior queer spirit of metaphor that allows it transform like Stockton's Queer Child, to grow sideways, potentially rescuing it from a strict adherence to Lee Edelman's Reproductive Futurism, in which things must always grow up or not at all. For the reason that specters, metaphor, and ambiguity does not necessarily mean something is void or nothing (in fact nothingness is starkly definite) I would suggest that mystery might be a better word than blank; even better than secret, which supposes a point in which the totality of the object would be revealed.
The mystery (or in psychoanalysis the essential lack) of Emaré gestures to an interiority which retreats beyond the view of the reader and transcends beyond the bounds of hegemonic structures of reading. She is ambiguous in her qualities and her intents. We can gleam various readings about her by reading the effects she has on the things around her, but even when we attend to them, make them significant in the art, we then lose sight of Emaré. Her character, as well as the other objects which exist with her, possess a power to do many things, draw us in without revealing a nessisary cause, and to transform through metaphor, allegory and other readings because of this ambiguity. If we could ever reduce Emaré to simple cause and effect, to simple allegory, and if these could be isolated and understood completely themselves, we would in fact have a very dead text. We could observe what is useful to us and leave the rest unknown. We would make the Art abject and forget about it. Of course, an "event" could still cause it to gleam and catch our attention and perhaps a few specters could escape their entombment to resurrect the text.
The mystery (or in psychoanalysis the essential lack) of Emaré gestures to an interiority which retreats beyond the view of the reader and transcends beyond the bounds of hegemonic structures of reading. She is ambiguous in her qualities and her intents. We can gleam various readings about her by reading the effects she has on the things around her, but even when we attend to them, make them significant in the art, we then lose sight of Emaré. Her character, as well as the other objects which exist with her, possess a power to do many things, draw us in without revealing a nessisary cause, and to transform through metaphor, allegory and other readings because of this ambiguity. If we could ever reduce Emaré to simple cause and effect, to simple allegory, and if these could be isolated and understood completely themselves, we would in fact have a very dead text. We could observe what is useful to us and leave the rest unknown. We would make the Art abject and forget about it. Of course, an "event" could still cause it to gleam and catch our attention and perhaps a few specters could escape their entombment to resurrect the text.
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V. The Allure of Tomb Stones
What comes of this queer spectrality is not only that which brings the text-object to life but may in fact gesture to the real interiority of things as articulate by Graham Harman. Working through Husserl and Heidegger, Harman proposes a Fourfold dimension to Objective being: the real object, the real qualities, the sensual object and the sensual qualities. In attending to the object as art, we are "confronted" by the objects sensual qualities and touch the sensual object. By "theorizing" this art-text-object we can come to discern real qualities about the object (there is a chance for us to access real information on objects, even if we do not know them in their totality). What concerns us most here is that Harman also suggests that there is an "allure" which the sensual qualities which we contact by attending to an art object allows us to feel/sense/touch through mediation the real object. We cannot directly know or touch objects (we may only engage with sensual objects) but, through the queer specters of passively engaging with the unknown, we may be given a glimpse at access to the objects hard kernel of reality. In this way "art" and especially a "queer method of attending to art" may be the most sound way to engage with the reality of an objective world. Perhaps?
In Emaré we might very well see this quadruple object at work in Emaré's inscrutability. While she is physically encountered by the Emperor and his court, and we may say that there are real objects and real qualities present, her identity can still be misread and information about her can still be manipulated by the King's mother. This evidences that while the encounter with Emaré as a text (both as the text of the Breton Lay and as the person in the story) with all manner of sensual qualities and presence, we must theorize the real qualities and can only feel inclined towards the allure of real presence without ever directly touching or being assured of its reality. This is Harman's move which runs counter to a physchoanlytic or certain phenomenological readings of Emaré which would insist that we are so bound to our subjective reality that we can only ever be materialists, interacting with the world as symbolic reality. Harman would promote an encountering of Emaré, like all Art, and objects with as much of an active as a passive sense of wonder on understanding beyond subjective oriented, epistemological certainty, which he calls Speculative Realism.
Graham Harman's Quadruple Object
In Emaré we might very well see this quadruple object at work in Emaré's inscrutability. While she is physically encountered by the Emperor and his court, and we may say that there are real objects and real qualities present, her identity can still be misread and information about her can still be manipulated by the King's mother. This evidences that while the encounter with Emaré as a text (both as the text of the Breton Lay and as the person in the story) with all manner of sensual qualities and presence, we must theorize the real qualities and can only feel inclined towards the allure of real presence without ever directly touching or being assured of its reality. This is Harman's move which runs counter to a physchoanlytic or certain phenomenological readings of Emaré which would insist that we are so bound to our subjective reality that we can only ever be materialists, interacting with the world as symbolic reality. Harman would promote an encountering of Emaré, like all Art, and objects with as much of an active as a passive sense of wonder on understanding beyond subjective oriented, epistemological certainty, which he calls Speculative Realism.
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Emaré, Lines 157-168
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