Notes On The Aniconic

Two presences are unavoidable in transference situations. They are not limited to transference situations; and they occur in situations that are not overtly transferential. But it requires the intensity possible in the transference to disclose their inseparability. They are like shadow and light.

One of them is an object of possible cognition - an “other” that the self hopes to know and to engage with. Freud thought that this object was realisable through the enactment of what he called secondary process. His “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911b) describes how secondary process can transform the ego. The ego’s capacity to test the “reality” of the object of possible cognition increases its ability to think and curbs its tendency for impulsive behaviour. By being able to attend, it is able to link up consciousness and sense information and to direct the sensory organs towards the external world. In secondary process, the ability to judge and assess somehow replaces the impulse to repress. The ego is able to deploy notation as a function of memory.

The existence of the object of possible cognition depends on its being an object that can be represented and notated. Its nature is such that it draws attention to memory as being of unusual importance, and to beliefs in a temporal repository for “that which has been”.1 It disavows the possibility that “the past” might be a concept of the imagination, a refraction into time of some unknowable and atemporal existence. It attempts to give to “the past” the appearance of a scientific fact.

The other presence in the transference is a type of transformation that Bion (1970) has described as “O”, and which is definable (insofar as it is definable) as a verb-noun, rather than as a noun. “O” manifests itself as a becoming; and becoming is thought to derive from being; it is an ontological presence. The empiricist cannot investigate “O”, although “O” may be the metaphysical base for empiricism. It is an existent without direct representation, manifesting itself through intuition and possibly anxiety, but “how” it manifests itself is open to conjecture. It is possible that it does not respond to “how” questions.

The history of transference could be written firstly in terms of an evolution towards the discovery of the object of cognition and secondly in terms of an evolution towards the discovery of the disjunctive transformations that typify “O” and that Bion describes as forms of catastrophic change.

The theory of secondary process postulates, without examination, that “that which is” is “that which can be represented”. It does not bring into its orbit types of existence whose nature is such that they are without representation. It does not account for the fact that intuitions concerning transformations of the “O” type disable such secondary-process functions as notation, attention, and the making of judgements.

Freud’s assumption that the mind in sanity will investigate the object of cognition does not address the question as to why any mind should open itself to the existence unconstrained by duration that Spinoza called existence itself: an existence that, since it has no need for the schemas of duration, has no means by which it can be represented and possibly has no need to be represented. The same question might be posed of those who seek to give a religious depth that cannot be directly represented to form in art.

A poetic symbol may articulate itself through the instrumentality of sequence, whether in space or time, but it need not operate in this way. For instance, the Hindu yantra is an escape, a wrought object intended to focus spiritual insight, which by its power to concentrate thought anticipates the later discovery of optic magnification, whether by microscope or telescope. The yantra operates means of instrumentality that are not sequential; and although it makes use of extension, it appears to depend on a concept of metaphysical space that is different from the space of sensory apprehension.

In my view, the history of the concept of contact barrier, which originated in psychoanalysis as a neurological concept, and which then evolved into being some kind of membrane between different mental functions, has further evolved into a means for violent and inconsequential transformation. (The hemming of “O” gives rise to the religious institutionalising of “catastrophic change” in the form of limens and altars.) By this means, contact barrier is able to articulate spiritual insight. Its functionality is meaningful only insofar as it is used in the service of articulating the presence of the poetic symbol - a “form of life”, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase, that emerges unaccountably out of “nowhere” and just “is”.
In his Ethics, Spinoza describes eternity as “without duration”.

I understand ETERNITY (aeternitus) to be existence itself, in so far as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the mere definition of an eternal thing. Explanation. - For such existence is conceived of as an eternal truth, just as is the essence of a thing, and therefore cannot be explained by duration or time, even though the duration is conceived of as wanting beginning and end. [Parkinson, 1989: 4]

The postulate concerning “that which is” as having to be “that which can be represented” depends on an unexamined assumption concerning some inherent metaphysical “rightness” in the subject-verb-object structure - as though a sentence structure of this kind existed, as of right, in congruence to some order in the cosmos.2 It is this assumed “rightness” of sentence structure that informs the principle that the sane mind (subject) investigates (verb) the object of potential cognition. It is an assumption on which Renaissance humanism depends.

In the becoming-of-"O" type of theory, the concepts of subject and object disappear; and in their place there is a floating gerund-like state of affairs, which may be evidence of some post-catastrophic fallout. The gerund “becoming” is an example of this: signs appear out of nowhere and without seeming intention. They have become. Because I do not know how they have become, I might be inclined to think of them as hallucinations. In which case, I will think all creationist theories to be species of hallucination; that is, if I wish to claim that forms of meaning can arise out of a condition that I cannot comprehend. But my proposal is that the iconic, whose ground is the aniconic, communicates meaning differently from the hallucination. It might be asked: in what way do these signs differ from hallucinations? One answer might be: in terms of conjectures concerning pre-birth phantasy. For instance, I might describe a foetal perception of the placenta as being like a gerund or verb-noun in which the constituents of subject and object float.

Among the Minyanka people of “West Africa (Jespers, 1979), there are two types of ritual burial: one burial is bound to the altar and involves three sacks containing yapere, or altar-fetishes, the other burial is of a jar containing the placenta. “Among the Minyanka, the placenta is the alter ego of the newborn. It is the silent witness of the ‘first words’ uttered in utero by the individual and, by analogy, of the first words registered in the divine matrix. It contains the signs that constitute the first creation” (ibid.: 82). The sacks represent “the sacred placenta out of which the universe was created” (Jespers, 1976: 117). “Our informants told us that all signs are signs of the anvil. The blacksmith, as master of initiation, is master of the sign” (Dieterlen & Cisse, 1972: 13).