Ruminations

You’ll often hear that creative writing or any creative process is riddled with unpleasantness. There’s second-guessing, doubt, and hesitation at almost every step. You don’t even have to search long on Twitter to find the testimonies of authors or poets who speak rather candidly of the fact that writing is a pain in the butt, as I’ve written before.

In a creative medium, one feels the abyss of choice constantly. One could say that a blank canvas and a blank document are the direct representations of freedom, which is why there’s something abyssal about them, something of the void. Every color in a painting, every word on the paper is an instantiation of a choice because the work of art distills the universal idea into a particular concrete thing. 

And yet, why is it that despite the process being constantly blocked by frustrations and agonies—experiences which have led artists to existential crises—the process is still nevertheless enjoyable? As Karl Ove Knausgaard has said, “I know that all writers are amateurs, and that perhaps the only thing they have in common is that they don’t know how a novel, a short story or a poem should be written. This fundamental uncertainty creates the need for habits, which are nothing other than a framework, scaffolding around the unpredictable.” So why do they then continue on this road of unknowing? 

There is, in the end, no certainty about what it is that should be done when you do art. There is a level of technique, a sort of ear or eye that keeps you attuned to your craft in the most practical of senses. But this eye, ear, or hand is just the craftsman’s expertise. It does not guide the idea, it does not tell what goes on the blank canvas, nor does it tell which colors to put within the lines, nor if the whole thing will be taken with meaning. But, I wonder, is not the enjoyment, the pleasure of the text, as Barthes would say, dependent on this abyss of uncertainty? 

There are various terms and concepts for this paradox of enjoyment in psychoanalysis. For Lacan, jouissance, or enjoyment, is a type of pleasure that transcends the pleasure principle. If the pleasure principle, as Freud postulated it, was an easing of usually organic tension (the orgasm was an easing of sexual tension, for example), then jouissance was a pleasure beyond it, a pleasure more than an easing of tension, which can only be instantiated by the defiles of the signifier insofar as the signifier, the symbol, comes from the Other. 

Two things are key here: first, jouissance is the movement past organic pleasure. It involves external stimulation, as in sadomasochistic sexual play, which sometimes works to increase tension. And second, jouissance’s key identifier is usually pain. On this second point, pain need not mean actual pain, but rather the affect of passing a limit, such as a man committing adultery who finds that it is precisely in the forbidden nature of the sexually adulterous act, in the breach of his marital vows, if he ever uttered them, that he finds the pure enjoyment of the act.

But, indeed, what are the limits imposed by the pleasure principle insofar as they have to do with art? We perhaps find hints of the pleasure principle when we hear an artist talking in an interview, often explaining their art, about how they needed to get something across, how they needed to express something. In other words, doesn’t this mean that there is some tension that they needed to relieve? Jouissance begins precisely at the moment when in trying to “express” ourselves, when we start the process of easing the tension, we discover that we’re failing, that we’re doubting, that there is something about our expressing what we wanted to express which falls short or is too excessive. Here, at this moment, we enter into the perhaps obsessional situation of pursuing “getting our expression right”—a pursuit naturally doomed to fail insofar as the symbolic and the real are at odds with each other, insofar as there is a real. Thus, the artist gets trapped in a gravitational vortex at the center of which is the goal of “getting it right,” whatever that means. But because of the signifier’s lack and/or excess—the signifier being all the artist has to work with—the artist will forever orbit “getting it right” without ever hitting the mark and thus be subject to the compulsion to repeat. So that the desire to express, a product of the pleasure principle, now becomes drive, a compulsive, repetitive quest with an object (the work) and a goal (the meaning?). In fact, Žižek goes on to say in In Defense of Lost Causes, “the weird movement called ‘drive’ is not driven by the ‘impossible’ quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the loss” (328). The drive thus enters into jouissance, becomes sustained by it, insofar as the very failure of “getting it right” is what leads, let’s say, a novelist to continue to write about the same topics in various novels and in various manifestations. The process of failure, the impediment itself, becomes a joy. The very setting down of language on the paper or color on the canvas becomes a jouissance that always pretends it will get it right this time, even as it’s marked by the negativity inherent in its signifying mechanisms. After all, how do I know that the Mona Lisa da Vinci painted represents the Mona Lisa he wanted to represent? Is not his artistic fastidiousness emblematic of the artist’s quest for “getting it right” as a compulsive process?

Art thus bears this structure of the drive. There is a repetitiveness to doing art that instantiates itself precisely because there is always something being missed in the execution of any one work of art. This thing that is missed can never be pointed out because it is precisely the very “kernel” of the meaning of the work. To use Lacanese, it’s the objet a, the object of the drive.  

The objet a is one of Lacanian theory’s most difficult concepts. It appears and reappears doing various elusive tasks. It is a carrier of fantasy, what structures our desire and, as Žižek says, what teaches us to desire. In almost all its manifestations and descriptions, there is a sense of it being sort of “dual,” phantasmatic. In other words, the objet a is the name for the peculiarity of an object of desire to elude our desire. It is what in the object attracts us to the object, what allows desire to begin its trajectory to the object, but which in some senses also resists it. This is why objet a has been called by Žižek and his followers the object cause of desire. Our objects of desire—a book, a car, a can of soda—have something about them, which may literally cover them, or envelop them, which is deeply attractive to us inasmuch as it also creates a barrier or a distance that keeps us from the object. We may, quite contrary to popular wisdom, actually be deeply in love with the cover of a book. The cover draws our gaze to it, but insofar as the cover covers the book, is not the book, is not what can be directly enjoyed, the cover functions like the objet a. 

But where do we find the objet a in an artwork? If objet a is the object cause of desire, there has to be the object of desire. But what is the object of my desire in an artwork? Indeed, let’s say I desire an artwork. I want a piece of art. I have to desire it as an artwork, so there must be something of it that I recognize as an artwork. But do I desire the artwork as an objective work or as the repository of, say, meaning? How do I know that Duchamp won’t just drop another toilet bowl in front of me? The question becomes very difficult when I am the artist: what is it that I want of my work? 

There is, of course, no answer in the sense that you’ll have a plethora of answers. Anything and everything has been said: “I want something that sells,” “Something that is beautiful,” “Something that is meaningful,” “Something that impacts,” and so on. 

There are many reasons why people want to express something, and even those artists who make vast livings by selling commercial works are not necessarily producing things that they find meaningless. Indeed, I’d even go so far as to say that the most “meaningless” art—or the art whose meaning has consisted in its meaninglessness, has actually been created by now-super-canonical artists like Beckett or Rothko.

Perhaps, the definitive element of the work of art, if we’re allowed to say such a vulgar, proud, phallic thing nowadays, is that the artwork itself is a type of gamble, a radical statement of meaning, so that what is essential is that the artist enacts the birth of meaning. Maybe, that an artwork means something is more important than what it means. The magnificence of the artist is in that they must make the sublime gesture indicating that there is meaning in their work even before the reader, the interpreter, or the critic can begin to speak.

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References

Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2017.