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Photography and surrealism

the material. But the register in which to ‘read’ enigmatic signiers (in psychoanalysis or surrealism) is not given because part of the signication is unconscious. This, however, does not mean that the photographic signier is the unconscious.57

Drawing on Jacques Lacan, Laplanche modies the conventional concept of the signier into two aspects. The enigmatic signier

is both a signier of (the signied, or so it is implied), and a signier to. This foregrounding of ‘signifying to’ is extremely important, as a signier can signify to without its addressee necessarily knowing what it signies … know that it signies, but not what it signies … we know that there is ‘a signifying’ somewhere, but there is not necessarily any explicit signied. Lacan suggests the image of hieroglyphs in the desert, or of cuneiform characters carved on a tablet of stone; we know that they signify, and that, as such, they have their own kind of existence, an existence which is phenomenologically different to that of things; they are intended to signify something to us, but we do not necessarily have a signied which we can ascribe to them.58

The enigmatic signier can be considered in relation to the poetic image of the surrealists (in whatever medium) as a signier to some thing in which what is (unconsciously) signied is, as Laplanche puts it, ‘designied’.59

In analogy with the ‘enigmatic signier’ in psycho-analysis, the surreal image in surrealism offers a meaning (an unresolved contradiction) to the spectator while an-other message is nevertheless ‘hidden’ or ‘designied’.

Like the dream image, surrealist images were not necessarily intended to be read, they are not like normal acts of communication. So surrealist images might be treated like Freud treated the dreams of his patients, only here, without the presence of the author of the image, we cannot ask them for their associations. Instead, though, we can work up chains of association along historical paths and build their analysis by reconstructing the elds of connotation in which the images were produced and sparked original fantasies. This is the model of research in this book. Freud’s Interpretation

Usually cited from Freud’s text is the complex E. T. A. Hoff-mann story of The Sandman, a fantastic tale discussed at length and from which many motifs of the uncanny catalogued above are drawn. Freud also mentions a ‘naive enough story’ from an English magazine which, he says, produced a ‘quite remarkable’ uncanny feeling: ‘a story about a young married couple who moved into a furnished house in which there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards evening an intoler-able and very specic smell begins to pervade the house; they stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form gliding over the stairs – in short, we are given to understand that the presence of the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort.’ [my italics]. Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, S.E.,Vol. XVII, pp. –.

The fantasy of the story, the ‘very specic smell’ of the reptil-ian ‘animal’ pervading the house, coupled with the haunting sense of movement in the dark are sufficient clues to the enigma of a primal scene. Such ‘trashy’ forms of culture are neglected in studies on the uncanny.

Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, pp. –.

Ibid., p. .