Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Lewis Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136747151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This volume offers a varied and informed series of approaches to questions of mobility—actual, social, virtual, and imaginary—as related to visual culture. Contributors address these questions in light of important contemporary issues such as migration; globalization; trans-nationality and trans-cultural difference; art, space and place; new media; fantasy and identity; and the movement across and the transgression of the proprieties of boundaries and borders. The book invites the reader to read across the collection, noting differences or making connections between media and forms and between audiences, critical traditions and practitioners, with a view to developing a more informed understanding of visual culture and its modalities of mobility and fantasy as encouraged by dominant, emergent, and radical forms of visual practice.

1 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture

Image, Non-image Space and Trajectories of the Look

Lewis Johnson

Introducing Mobility and Fantasy

Once apparently marginal, the ramifications of questions of mobility in the conceptualisation, analysis and evaluation of visual culture continue to multiply. Across the disciplines that concern themselves with what is viewed and what is made to be viewed—from the history of art, media studies, photography, film and video studies to anthropology, ethnology and ethnography—the range of questions concerning activities of viewing continues to extend, with questions of the mobility of spectators playing a significant part. It might be thought that this range of questions is fundamentally affected if not conditioned by the recent emergence of mobile viewing technologies, and it is part of the interest of this collection that it aims to respond to this sort of speculation. There is a growing literature that answers to Nikos Papastergiadis’ observation that the “multiple effects” of new technologies have been “an under-researched field in migration studies”, for instance.¹ This collection responds by suggesting that, with the evident pluralisation of modes of transmission and reception of images offered by such mobile technologies, there is an opportunity and, more, a need to rethink the implications of mobility in viewing. As many have suggested, across the syncopated fields of the study of visual culture, if also in the so-called hard sciences, viewing is not to be taken simply as an ideal, stable and distanced observing of ideal, stable and distanced objects, but is rather a series of activities, differently undertaken and differently motivated, that is implicated in what it views. If viewing is not this sort of objectivist observing, which is rather a theoreticist fantasy of immobility of subject and/or object, the relations between mobility and viewing are in need of better axioms.

The aims of this collection are thus to consider a range of topics in the study of visual culture—across the series of its possible objects and in relation to a range of methodological precepts and procedures—that intervene in the debate about the significance of mobility and viewing, rethinking them across this objectivist notion of vision as well as, more broadly, in relation to the suggestion that something like fantasy is operative even in the very constitution of notional norms of viewing. As the contributions in this collection attest, there are many ways of taking, and leaving, this term “fantasy.” Paradoxically, what is shared here, so far as conceptualisations and senses of fantasy are concerned, may be little more than a concern not to take or leave the term simply as a sort of opposite of reality. More and less conscious, more and less unconscious, as even patient discourses of psychoanalysis cannot, it seems, quite settle for us, it is this equivocality of the use of this term that points crucially to divisions in models of activity which invite us to acknowledge the implication of modes of subject-hood in traces of object-hood, as well as in wider considerations of shareable questions of culture, identity, power and pleasure in relation to the study of the visual.

Without insisting on a psychoanalytic framework, believing that psychoanalysis ought not to be taken as the last word on fantasy, on desire or even on resistance, either to its own arguments or those of other fields, it is instructive to recall that the issue of what we may call the inscription of fantasy, as more or less conscious or unconscious, accompanies argumentation over the use of the notion of fantasy by psychoanalytic thinkers who have been significant in the development of both psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytically informed cultural theory and criticism.² Victor Burgin’s piece, which concludes this volume, shows how Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object, itself a development of accounts of fantasy and ego formation as found in the object-relations tradition of psychoanalytic thought that may be traced to the work of Melanie Klein, may be used to explicate captivation by but also resistance to and reinvention of digital visual culture today. The challenge of Burgin’s position concerning the transitional is to draw attention to the liminal status of the typically two-way, interactive modes of participation in the digital in a way that involves the suspension of stable boundaries between external and internal realities, and the need to acknowledge and to work with these instabilities. This collection thus continues the trend of rejecting orthodoxies of Lacanian cultural critical discourse concerning “the imaginary” and “the symbolic”, with the apparent clarity of the segregation of the one from the other tending to promote too many dogmatic accounts of the meanings and values of desires, fantasies and thus cultural objects more broadly.

The use of Lacan in cultural criticism has moved away from notions of fantasy, with the stress falling instead on conceptualities of enjoyment.³ Apparently radical, with enjoyment not meaning just taking pleasure but becoming implicated in the veritable cause or object-cause of desire, the problem of Lacanian phallic dogmatism returns at another level. The promise is one of transformation: the repetition of cultural pleasure may be altered if the imaginariness of the object-cause of desire—the object as necessarily fantasized in withdrawal—is brought about. But how? One might say that this is just the problem of cultural criticism, but the very denunciation of enjoyment would supply any and all failures of cultural texts to be something other than repetitive forms of pleasure, effectively confounding critical assessment.

As the argument about the diagnosis of enjoyment shows, fantasy returns as what is to be overcome in the overcoming of the object-cause of desire. The aims of this collection are therefore less the overcoming of fantasy than a series of acknowledgements of its role in the constitution of realities, in particular the realities of mobility. If it is in the withdrawal of the object of pleasure or satisfaction, archetypically the mother’s breast, that a psychoanalytic subject is born—divided between projective identification as the instrumentally re-empowered fantasist of an imaginary substitute staged in fantasy and introjective identification with the very breast that the subject does not have, an introjective identification that supports the very possibility of that projective identification—then the one who fantasizes is dispersed across a potentially proliferating series of identifications. For Laplanche and Pontalis, “permutations of roles and attributions are possible”, for fantasy would be a “sequence” in which desire is “staged”.⁴ Without being sure of the boundaries of the metaphor as metaphor, what Freud called the “free mobility” of desire depends on a certain imaginary framing, a framing that, in staging, spatialises, allowing for permutations of sequence by means of a series of passages—or what I shall call trajectories—across that framing.⁵

Laplanche and Pontalis raised a series of objections to tracing the function of fantasy to what Freud called Wunschphantasie or wish-fantasies and “a hallucinatory cathecting of the memory of satisfaction”, as they did to Freud’s speculations on the role of culturally inherited “primal fantasies.”⁶ Their work on the “phantasmatic”, the cooperation of one unconscious fantasy with another, has been successfully used in connection with the criticism of Orientalism, helping to square the circle of how the Orient was imagined as the zone of maximal rule and maximal absence of rule, the site of the idealised but dysfunctional legislation of the oriental despot, as well as the site of the dedication to a pursuit of pleasure while yet being a space of indolence. It is not a minor interest of this collection of essays that it re-engages with the meanings of this boundary, between West and East, and if Laplanche and Pontalis’ work has helped to point to the complexity of this formation, it has neglected to encourage remarking on the meanings of the ambivalence that have accompanied this proliferation of fantasies. Excluding Wunschphantasie, they effectively restricted the acknowledgement of ambivalence by resisting the meanings of the trace of the object of satisfaction: inscribed as unconscious, its re-inscription in fantasy, hallucinatory or otherwise, would be necessarily accompanied by unpleasure as well as pleasure, not being that object itself. One of this collection’s more significant implications, therefore, is a certain displacement of the exceptionalising of Orientalism: if orientalist fantasies betray an apparently radical ambivalence, then this is latent in fantasy as such in so far as fantasy negotiates between satisfaction and pleasure. Laplanche and Pontalis exceptionalise the phantasmatic, but its structuring helps us to understand how unconscious desire can circumvent the censorship of the ego in fantasy, while yet continuing to seek satisfaction in further, displaced forms.

There are further models of divided agency in psychoanalytic thought, divisions that implicate something like the temporalising as well as spatialising mentioned above, that the topics of mobility and fantasy tend to point us towards, but it would be as well to stress that this is not to provide a master key for the analyses of particular works that follow or an obligatory conceptualisation of wider problematics in the study of visual culture.⁷ The nature of the topic of mobility in relation to viewing means that the essays in this collection do not forestall the multiplication of opportunities of thinking about their intersection, by outlining and answering all possible questions, but rather, both more modestly and more ambitiously, encourage them to proliferate. The paths to be traced and retraced through the essays that follow this one are thus not to be limited, in their meanings and effects, to the clarifications about the series of topics and objects that they nevertheless address and, indeed, clarify, numerous though these clarifications are. Indications, then, that there is something uncanny, familiar yet unfamiliar, at work or in play in the forms or instances of recent or not so recent visual culture that draw us in thoughts of mobility are too numerous wholly to ignore.

From the unstable materiality of the analogue photographic image—with which Stephen Bann begins his exploration of the significance of place in the work of a series of contemporary artists and to which he returns in conclusion in the outsize elaboration of this in the work of Simon Starling— to the destabilisations of the digital stabilisations of such materialities in Victor Burgin’s critical address about the restaging of mobility, contesting the promises and effectivities of software that will “reconstruct” the movement between our digital photographs of sites and places, in favour of a use of digital technologies that opens up, in his installation work and elsewhere, to a reimagined remembering of place, this collection provides for trajectories that invite us to rethink the roles of images in a series of actualities and imaginaries of movement. In the sections that follow, the collection is organized so as to enable the thinking and rethinking of the ways in which what are termed still, moving and interactive images draw us into questions of movement and mobility. As the title of this collection may suggest, however, the invitation is also one that solicits a thinking of the complexification of such categorical distinctions, not only between types of images and their relation or non-relation to movement or mobility, but also between senses of mobility and fantasy. An understanding of the mutual implication of senses of these two terms, of some mobility in fantasy and of some fantasy in mobility, is solicited, then, not simply by this collection of essays, but by the thought and study of visual culture today, a study which can reopen senses of future, as well as past and present visual culture in their making, remaking, rethinking and viewing.

Fantasy in Mobility, Mobility in Fantasy—With Remarks on Media

It was because of the crossing into each other of senses of mobility and fantasy that, in planning the symposium in Istanbul from which the texts collected in this volume derive, I selected a quotation from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet to act as the epigraph for the event. In recent work, Pessoa has been cited to support arguments about the pluralisation of senses and questions of identity, and this is doubtless a significant part of the interest of his work. Less remarked upon, however, is the relation between the cultivation of alter-egoistic signatories and a resistance to travel. Opposing some of the signs of enlightenment cosmopolitanism, Pessoa spent most of his life in Lisbon, in relation to which his rejection of enlightenment through travel and through something like the encountering of others starts to become significant for an understanding of the axiomatics of mobility and fantasy.

It seems I was predisposed to read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet—an unmoored archipelago of a chronicle, with its ostensibly undated series of 481 diary-like essays salvaged from a suitcase and uncertainly edited into sequence—in relation to travel, mobility and fantasy, perhaps as a result of having acquired it at an airport. I say “ostensibly undated” for, while those essay entries bear no date and their sequence even bears significant traces of being chronologically scrambled, datedness is part of their significant effect. By this, I do not mean out-of-date. Mention of Constantinople or of horsedrawn modes of transportation tends to date the text, though the narrator’s consideration of tensions over Darwinism, atheism and religion do so less securely, given the recurrence of this in relation to recently recurring fundamentalist discourses. Perhaps it is rather the tension between such signs of a particular date and the sense of the occasion of the writing of most entries, the sense of a day drawing to a close, an evening, a night, a dream, or a day un-commenced, that haunt us with a sense of uncanny familiarity. These were days and nights, with dates, but the text reaches out, crossing unstable boundaries between one temporal phase and another, as well as states of relative illumination or obscurity, rejecting faith in God and faith in humanity or even in the “aggregate of animal species”, leaving the narrator little choice, it is said, but decadence or aestheticism. “I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up”, the text reads. This inn could be seen as “a prison, for I am compelled to wait in it” or “as a social center, for it’s here that I meet others.” Some stay in their rooms, some chat in the parlours. Our narrator, however, sits at the door “feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape”, aiming to educate his sensibility. Having broached the characteristic structure of the narration, and the sense of relation, disposition and sense of purpose of the narrator, short essay 1 concludes:

If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.⁸

Pessoa’s figure of the inn and of waiting for t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Figures from Elsewhere
• 1 Mobility and Fantasy in Visual Culture Image, Non-image Space and Trajectories of the Look
• Part I Still Images and Objects Introduction
• Part II Moving Images Introduction
• Part III Interactive Images Introduction
• Part IV Boundaries, Borders, Limits and Mobility Introduction
• Part V Theorising Mobility and Fantasy
• Contributors
• Index