ECOCRITICAL ANALYSIS
The popular use of the potter’s vase to display a bunch of cut flowers in water was first recorded in ancient Egyptian culture. The purpose of this enduring custom is not need, instead, its significance has always been symbolic pleasure.
Today, this prevailing practice is still supplying the same social product, worldwide and on an industrialised scale. Through mass consumption, we have become part of a ‘global project’ in which we share the same collective gaze of the flower vase as sublime object of desire.
The focus of this ecocritical analysis in not on what has changed since ancient time, but rather, how fantasy has enabled this social product to remain desirable throughout history.
For, decoding the flower-vase fantasy ought to enable us to identify and reconfigure the imaginary lure of other social products that are devastating the ecology.
The objective is ethical and public interest: to empower a theoretical and symbolic understanding of our subjective role in ecocide.
The intention is to place the flower-vase subject on the psychoanalytic couch and bring to light its disavowed truth; to learn something new about its content on a formal level; and become aware of a disturbing side of it that we knew all along, the signified flower-vase image is a distortion of nature.
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The flower-vase convention functions as fantasy in which human culture usurps nature, exchanging the primal vitality of nature for symbolic beauty – exchanging wholeness for partial object.
Fantasy ought to have an ethical function of beauty: it not only produces the visual image pertaining to the flower-vase symbolic, but also structures this image as social product for public consumption. Fantasy regulates the sustainability of the object of desire – Fantasy coordinates desire.
In psychoanalysis, we have a Lacanian formula: The object of desire is that which never satisfies. Where there is lack, such as in artifice or partial object, there is human desire. Lacan’s name for this imaginary, partial object is ‘Objet petit a’ – the matheme of fantasy. Objet a is the unattainable object of desire.
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The flower-vase symbolic comes into being through signification, the coalescence of three signifiers and a subject: The first signifier is the ceramic object, the second is the concealed void within, around which the potter shaped the vase object, and the third is the partial object, the cut flowers placed within the void and protruding the rim of the vase as floral arrangement. The subject’s trajectory gaze of the collocation signifies a fantasy of cultural mastery of nature – symbolised as beauty.
In short, we have Lacan’s three psychical registers, namely the Real (both the void within the vase and the lost vitality of the dissected flowers lacks symbolisation), the Imaginary (the decorated vase and the floral arrangement as visual image), and Symbolic representation (encompassing both the visual image and, at its core, concealment of void and lack).
The lack at the core of the flower-vase symbolic (the void and dissect) is concealed by a cultural screen of anthropocentric fantasy. In other words, anthropocentricism is a fantasy screen that projects a distorted image in which culture is seen as master of nature.
The lack at the core of the flower-vase convention becomes palpable when, metaphorically, we erase the anthropological coordinates and give image to the nascent ego – the undistorted primordial image.
In the undistorted image we find body parts of dismembered organs and mutilated amputations, not returning to the belly of the earth, but shriveling down the neck of the vase to rot in its sepulchral void – without mourn for loss of pollination and rejuvenating longevity.
We usually escape this unbearable ‘protocol of sight’ by trashing the carcass remnant of the plant, concealing the cadaver residue in the apathetic rubbish bin – and then we repeat.
We repeat endlessly because anthropocentric fantasy does not sustain our desire. The fantasy is inadequate because, instead of articulating the cadaver residue of the Thing (objet a) into the signifying structure of the symbolic, fantasy first conceals it and then erases it without trace – leaving us in an unsustainable cycle of consuming.
The spiral of destruction can be prevented by articulating the object cause of desire within the fantasy and capturing an imaginary image of objet a within the symbolic representation.
In our callous climate of ecocide, the ideology of anthropocentrism seems murderously unsustainable. We must reach for cultural intervention to come up with new sublimations, replace our defunct coordinates, reimagine fantasy, and rethink our symbolic subjectivity.
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY IN PRACTICE
In the artwork Sarcophagus of Fragrance, aesthetic sublimation gracefully reveals the real that is concealed beyond the rim of the conventional flower vase. The sublime trajectory provides an anamorphic image replacement for the symbolic lack at the core of our flower-vase convention.
The artistic consolidation deploys the ethical function of beauty to establish reflexive coordinates for trajectorial gazing. The new trajectory provides a distant, Goldilocks orbit from where desire can be sustained while we circle the vase artifice with prolonged aesthetic ponder and reconsideration.
The rim of the vase is ground zero – it is a placeholder for loss. What is lost cannot be found. At this ‘extimité’ position (intimate exteriority), where inside and outside merge, Lacan’s object a gracefully occupies the vacant place of the lost Thing. Objet a as uncanny, reappearance of the lost Thing.
Positioned as placeholder, at ground zero, Objet a assumes the position of symbolic lack at the core of the flower-vase convention. The imaginary representation physically marks the designated place of symbolic absence.
Objet a cannot be symbolised, it is an abstract signifier detached from social status and the existing framework of meaning. It takes the place of that which was lost when the flower was cut, that brute which did not come with the dissect flower when it was traumatically ruptured from the real.
From within the neck of the vase, at ground zero, a fascinating Thing of primordial beauty erupts. Without symbolic reflection, it is indifferent and singular – an embryonic mass of brute otherness. Uncanny, it lures the gaze for contemplating the threshold of symbolic representation.
Sublimation raises the aesthetic object to the dignity of the Thing – unravelling the conventional trajectory of the flower vase. With the familiar rendered unfamiliar, we can now see strangeness where we have ceased to see the peculiarity of concealment.
With conventional trajectory unraveled and visual perception slowed down to a phantasmatic gaze, new ways to stich it back together becomes thinkable. The anamorphic trajectory enables condition of possibility to reconfigure the symbolic of the flower vase.
With curatorial context (discourse of ecocriticism) alongside the sublime fantasy of aesthetic reception (gallery installation), Sarcophagus of Fragrance has ethical promise for creative play in cultural representation of nature.
January 2022, Johannes Scott