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Photography and surrealism

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The automatic image

speech’, as Jacques Derrida once described it.48 Third, that for Breton at this time the recording of the image is itself simply enough; in so far as it gives rise to a surreal image, it is not subject to any analysis as in Freudian praxis. It is not the starting point for an interpretation. The image has a (designied) value in itself as the recognition of a ‘psychical thought’, as opaque and ‘marvellous’ (enigmatic). Fourth, the ‘interminable quar-rel raging within’ which Breton notes demonstrates the relation of the image to an unresolved psychical conict. That the image is one in a string of images which are in some sense disturbing for Breton is his stated reason for attempting to terminate their ow: ‘all I could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging within me’. Breton tacitly admits to having invoked a psychical conict; the image is far from ‘gratuitous’ or ‘arbitrary’ and supports the very psychical determinism the surrealist theory of the image was premised upon.

It is the radical disparity of signifying elements of the image that Breton insists upon as the denition of the value of the surrealist image in the ‘spark obtained’. Thirty-three years later, Jacques Lacan will pay homage to this in his essay ‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’, that ‘modern poetry’ (surrealism) had demonstrated the constitution of metaphor, which Lacan then also laconically critiques as a ‘confused position based on a false doctrine’.49 Lacan:

The creative spark of the metaphor does not spring from the presentation of two images, that is, of two signiers equally actualized. It ashes between two sig-niers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the occulted signier remaining present through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of the chain.50

One sign stands in for another in metonymic and meta-phoric (disrupted) chains of association. The ‘creative spark’ emerges in this substitutive activity between the metamorphosized elements and this is where the psychical conict of the image potentially manifests itself. To take a visual example, in Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres the ‘f-holes’ in the picture are a metonymy (a part of the sign stands in) for a whole violin. This

Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ), p. .

Jacques Lacan, ‘Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’, Ecrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, ), p. .

Ibid.