Abject Objects: Perversion and the Modernist Grid

Abstract

This article challenges current psychoanalytical thought according to which the three Lacanian clinics of the neurotic, pervert and psychotic coexist in any given era, and suggests instead that identifiable environmental conditions are key to the surfacing of a specific and dominant construction of the self. In the case of the pervert, the narcissistic wounds inflicted by science and technology, as well as an increasingly hostile lifestyle dictated by the Industrial Revolution, become key factors that delineate a form of subjectivity in urgent need of overcoming internal splits. The modernist grid, which both the artistic avant-garde and the pioneers of modern architecture address during the first half of the twentieth century as the panacea for a corrupted world, is here discussed in terms of a subject whose imaginary worldview is determined by the vantage point offered by visual-machines, such as geometric grids, as applied to the production of a sanitized and overcontrolled urban environment. Both the mechanisms and outcomes of this interpretation of the evolution of Western city design are part of the original research question that this article addresses.

Keywords:

• architecture
• avant-gardes
• Baudrillard
• city
• grid
• Lacan
• modernist
• perversion

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1930] (New York, Norton, 1961), 39.

2. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1992); Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001); Lorens Holm, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2010); and John Shannon Hendrix, Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan (New York: Peter Laing Publishing, 2006).

3. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

4. John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyan Holm, eds., Architecture and the Unconscious (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2016).

5. Timothy D. Martin, “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis in Architecture and Urban Design,” in Architecture and the Unconscious, ed. John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyan Holm (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2016), 167–80.

6. Jane Rendell, The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: Spaces of Transition (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); and Emma Cheatle, Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017).

7. Dylan Evans, An introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 191.

8. Volker Hoffmann, “Giotto and Renaissance Perspective,” Nexus Network Journal 12, no. 1 (2010): 5–32. doi:10.1007/s00004-010-0015-7. The costruzione legittima is a method of linear perspective.

9. The result is not just a new paradigm shift, the costruzione legittima, as an original re-reading of the universe in terms of both countable and accountable measures, but also the emergence of the discipline of architecture as the medium through which God’s design of the macrocosm can best be investigated and comprehended. Francesco Proto, “Seducing God(s): Renaissance Ideal Cities as Mirror-images of Western Subjectivity,” in Architecture and the Unconscious, ed. John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyan Holm (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2016), 119–135.

10. Quilting points, anchoring points or point de capiton in French literally designate in Lacanian theory “upholstery buttons” where the “mattress-maker’s needle has worked hard to prevent a shapeless mass of stuffing from moving too freely about.” Quilting points are here used to denote both the costruzione legittima and the modernist grid as “attachment points” around which the zeitgeist of a whole epoch coagulates. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991) quoted in Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 151.

11. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16–19.

12. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 205–6.

13. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976], trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 5.

14. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 191.

15. Zvi Lothane, “Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Related Works: A Reappraisal,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 32, no. 6 (2012): 526.

16. Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as an in-Mixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever,” in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970/72): 189.

17. Hendrix and Holm, Architecture and the Unconscious, 3.

18. Massimo Recalcati, “I tre passi fondamentali della perversione” [The Three Fundamental Steps of Perversion], Doppiozero (2017): 63–4. Available online: https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/i-tre-passi-fondamentali-della-perversione.

19. Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Fall 1996): 114.

20. Jacques Lacan, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis”: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII, 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes Dennis Porter (Hove: Routledge, 1992).

21. Lorens Holm, “Space and Its Assembled Subjects,” in Transgression: Towards an Expanded Field of Architecture, ed. Louis Rice and David Littlefield (Abingdon, UK: Routledge), 42.

22. Serge André, “The Structure of Perversion: A Lacanian Perspective,” in Perversion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives – Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, ed. Lisa Downing and Dany Nobus (London: Routledge, 2018), 110.

23. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings [1905], ed., trans. and intro. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (London: Penguin Books, 2002).

24. See diagram in Holm, “Space and Its Assembled Subjects,” 42.

25. André, “Structure of Perversion,” 111.

26. Ibid., 117.

27. Recalcati, “Three Fundamental Steps.”

28. Jacques Lacan, “Kant avec Sade,” in Ecrits (Paris, Édition du Seuil, 1966), 765–790.

29. Recalcati, “Three Fundamental Steps,” 1–2.

30. Evans, Introductory Dictionary, 94.

31. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, 1967–1968 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2006).

32. Recalcati, “Three Fundamental Steps.”

33. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacque Lacan, Book X, Anxiety, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French typescripts (1962–63), 44 and 70–1. Available online: http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Seminar-X-Revised-by-Mary-Cherou-Lagreze.pdf.

34. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism (1924),” in Manifestoes of Surrealism [1962], trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 1–48.

35. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [1899] (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983).

36. Donald Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.

37. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” October 18 (1981), 53.

38. Krauss wrote: “[I]n describing the formation of intelligence up to the age of three or four […] [Lacan] seems to have abandoned the notion of developmental stages […] and to have organized everything around the fear of castration […] Like the Klein Group, like the modernist visual graph, the L Schema is set up to acknowledge structuralism’s drive toward logical clarity […] But this the L Schema does only to challenge the very transparency announced by the structuralist diagram itself […] Permanent and opaque, this obstacle is installed within the very heart of a diagrammatic clarity that is now a model both of vision’s claims and of vision’s failure.” Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 73–6.

39. See also: Lorens Holm, “eS aitcH eYe Tee,” The Journal of Architecture 12, no. 4 (2007): 423–436.

40. Andrew McNamara, “Between Flux and Certitude: The Grid in Avant Garde Utopian Thought,” Art History 15, no. 1 (March 1992): 66.

41. Le Corbusier quoted in ibid., 66.

42. Victor Velasquez, “Architectural Patrimony in the Graphical Representation of the Voisin Plan,” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 40, no. 3 (2016): 233.

43. McNamara, “Between Flux and Certitude,” 66.

44. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death.

45. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde.”

46. Foster et al., eds., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 119; and Tessel M. Bauduin, “The Occult in the Visual Arts,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (Abingdon, UK: Routledge), 437–8.

47. The two case studies I am referring to here are the Citroën 2 CV, which Barthes discusses in Mythologies, and the airborne chair, which Baudrillard discusses in The System of Objects. In both cases, the car interior and the piece of domestic furniture are addressed as totalizing forms of ambience reminiscent of a maternal womb. Roland Barthes, Mythologies [1957] (London: Cape, 1972); and Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968] (London: Verso, 2005).

48. Baudrillard, System of Objects, 185–6.

49. See Vanessa Murphree, “Edward Bernay’s 1929 ‘Torches of Freedom’ March: Myths and Historical Significance,” American Journalism 32, no. 3 (2015): 258–61. For a thorough investigation of the ideological implications of the building see: Francesco Proto, Mass Identity Architecture: Architecture Writings of Jean Baudrillard (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2006), 136-149; Francesco Proto, “The Pompidou Centre: Or the Hidden Kernel of Dematerialization,” The Journal of Architecture 10, no. 5 (2005): 573–89.

50. At the height of disturbances in May 1968, De Gaulle’s legitimacy was challenged to the point of fleeing to Baden-Baden without notifying Prime Minister George Pompidou. His return to France followed reassurance of the military's support against the threat of a civil war. Mattei Dogan, “How Civil War Was Avoided in France,” Revue Internationale De Science Politique [International Political Science Review] 5, no. 3 (1984): 251.

51. Proto, “Seducing God(s).”

52. Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [1917], intro. Stephen Wilson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francesco Proto

Dr Francesco Proto is an architect and a theorist, and a Senior Lecturer in Architecture, Visual Culture and Critical Theory at Oxford Brookes University (UK). Both a Baudrillardian and a Lacanian scholar, he has recently released Baudrillard for Architects (Routledge, 2020). His current research focuses on the inhuman strategies of the subject.