Before language: the rage at the mother

The thesis argues that psychoanalysis is a necessary component of cultural analysis. It is argued that existing syntheses of psychoanalysis and political theories tend to limit the recognition of the relative autonomy of psychic reality by offering accounts of the social determination of subjectivity. The contemporary reappropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theorists has formulated new explanations of the social position of women as the 'second sex'. The challenge of feminism to traditional theories of culture and society includes questions of how sexual difference informs the transformation of thought into language, how language determines theory, and how theory conceptualises the difference between subjectivity and objectivity. The contradictions within existing syntheses of structuralism, Marxism and feminism are described, and the differences between psychoanalysis and sociology are traced through the the critical reception of Freud's Totem and Taboo by anthropologists. The validity of Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex is explored, and it is suggested that despite the limited acceptance by anthropologists, Totem and Taboo contains a valid theory of the relation of the subject to society. Freud's work is relocated within the paradigm of evolutionary biology to provide a materialist analysis of psychic structure that is not based on linguistics. A study of the origins of language reveals the complexity of the historical factors determining the co-evolution of representation, the maternal function, and the structuration of psychic reality. New discoveries about the pre-Oedipal dyad that underlies the Oedipus complex have shown the effects of infantile dependence and maternal care on adult subjectivity, and it is argued that factors such as the unconscious fear of dependency and of women are of particular significance for feminist thought. It is argued that the theory of pre-Oedipal and prelinguistic subjectivity can make intelligible aspects of ideologies of racism and sexism that are not fully explained by sociological or political theory. The mechanism of projection or projective identification, it is argued, provides a specifically psychoanalytic contribution to existing theories of culture

The sublime now.

The Sublime now is a collection of essays dealing with the sublime in contemporary theory, culture and society. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett, Mark Bould, Eu Jin Chua, Gudrun Filipska, Cornelia Klinger, Esther Leslie, William McDonald, Laura Mulvey, Claire Pajaczkowska, Griselda Pollock, Gene Ray, Bettina Reiber, Jan Rosiek, Sherryl Vint, and Luke White. Research Questions: The book critically examines the legacy of the sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and sets out to assess the value and dangers of this concept as it is articulated in its current resurgence in thought and practice. Research Context: The book situates itself in a recent trans-disciplinary resurgence of interest in the notion of the sublime. It includes essays whose approaches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It sets out to critically reflect on, as well as contribute to this growing discourse. Its particular focus is around the visual. The collection’s origins were in a two-day conference at the Tate Britain, organised by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium. The book selected from the papers delivered at the conference and also added other essays not presented at the conference. Findings: The book identifies key issues and themes which surround the contemporary articulation of the sublime: ecological debates and current attitudes to nature; globalisation and to the recent politics of terror; current reappraisals of Kantian thought; contemporary art and its intertwinement with legacies stretching back to the Baroque; the aesthetics of cinema. It discovers the sublime as a concept closely bound into contemporary debates around popular culture, gender, the body, nature, violence, politics and globalised capitalism. The sublime is a complexly ambivalent category which on the one had points us beyond debates of the postmodern, but which is also implicated in the ideologies of contemporary society

The thread of attachment

This article is included in an issue of the journal Textile, which I co-edited with Penina Barnett. The psychoanalysis of the image specifies that sight is to be understood as integrated with other corporeal senses, which has generated much interest in the haptic, touch and the logic of skin, liminality and the tactile components of the gaze. This piece reprises the theoretical concerns of my article ‘On Stuff and Nonsense' (see RA2 entry 1) which explores the relationship between meaning and embodiment in Visual Culture. The themes of corporeal subjectivity developed in ‘The Thread of Attachment' are repeated in those developed by my essay ‘On Humming: Marion Milner's Contribution to the British Psychoanalytic Society' in Caldwell, L & Joyce, A., (eds) Winnicott and After

Perversion and French Avant-Garde Art : 1912-1916.

This chapter was commissioned by the editors as part of a collection of papers on this new area of research in psychoanalysis and culture. Other contributors include Emily Apter, Tim Dean and Mandy Merck and Otto Kernberg). The work derives from my earlier book Perversion (Icon Books), which has been translated into several languages since its publication in 2000. The essay develops the themes of that work as a challenge of Lacanian psychoanalytic orthodoxy in this area. The essay considers the role of fetishism in the interpretation of avant-garde and newer traditions of site-specific installation in art

On stuff and nonsense: the complexity of cloth

This is the second of my essays the significance of fashion and textiles as cultural practices. Preceding work on the cultural legacy of the cotton industry as an invisible substrate of the canvas underlying the painter's 'toile', representing the repression of knowledge of both slave labour and the unconscious maternal haptic dimension of the visual, is presented in my essay 'Urban memory/ Suburban Oblivion' in Crinson (see RA2 return 4). This paper led to an invitation to lecture at the University of East Anglia in connection with the Sainsbury Art Centre's exhibition of the work of contemporary textile artists 'Cloth and Culture' (2007)

Urban memory: suburban oblivion.

The methodological issues raised by psychoanalysis for reconceptualising spatial and historical vectors of culture are explored here are developed via work on the ‘suburban' as site of modern subjectivity. This partly evolves from the traditions of modernity found in the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin on the urban subject of modern life. The concerns with liminality and liminal space arise from thoughts formulated at the conference Post Industrial Manchester, at Manchester University, School of Art History and Archaeology in October 2002. This research has been continued in the collaboration between members of the Visual Culture group and the Museum of Domestic Architecture, which has resulted in the conference, The Return of Suburbia, at which I gave a paper on the infantile unconscious of the suburb

The sublime in the work of Cornelia Parker.

Research Questions • How can the notion of the sublime be used to understand contemporary art? • How might such work be placed within longer histories of the sublime and its theoretical and cultural manifestations? • What are the (complex) relations between conceptions of the sublime and discourses on gender, the body, desire, materiality, and the everyday? Research Context This essay is part of the book The Sublime Now. It is co-authored by the book’s editors, Luke White and Claire Pajaczkowska. Cornelia Parker was a speaker at the conference which had been the starting point of the book. The essay sets out to recognise the importance of her work as an artistic articulation of the contemporary sublime, and of a number of the issues taken up in the conference and book. The essay more generally finds its place within discourses on the sublime in contemporary art and culture. Research Methods • The essay primarily proceeds through close readings of the five key works from across Parker’s career. • It contextualises and comments on these works through material from the histories of reflection on the sublime, as well as a range of theoretical viewpoints, in particular psychoanalysis. Findings The essay proposes that Parker's work stages the collapse of a series of binary oppositions which the sublime has long been a mode of articulating (sacred/profane, horizontal/vertical, material/immaterial, humour/horror, sublime/ridiculous, elevated/abject, nature/culture, public/domestic). The essay argues that such a collpse is itself a form of the sublime. Inasmuch as these are oppositions around which gendered identities are constructed, Parker's sublime plays a subversive or transgressive function. Parker’s sublime is also an exploration of experiences of nature in the context of current ecological concerns

Hello toy!

Report of a symposium in which both authors organised and participated in which explored play, object relations and affective machines