Sharon Kivland-
Reader Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University
LABOUR AND WAIT-Stream Repetition and Embodiment 

A long time ago an event occurred, which while trivial enough nonetheless seemed to neatly demonstrate the thoughts about repetition, transference, and the work of art that were then on my mind, and which have resurfaced lately. It is quite a sad story, and I may sound rather plaintive in telling it. It happened in Rome:  I watched a critic looking at an exhibition, one in which I was participating. I had had dinner with him a week before, and we had talked a lot about his work and interests, but little about mine. In viewing the exhibition he was immediately engaged by a small series of painted MDF panels, produced with masking tape and acrylics, giving the appearance of machine-production while being obviously touched by the hand of the artist. They were instantly recognisable, though not as the work of the young artist who had made them. My dinner companion deserted me in his recognition of these works. They succeeded in recalling to him something he loved, a kind of work he knew already and desired to see again. Though he did not know this work, he remained faithful to his type. Of course, I was foolish to expect that he would renounce his dedication to a genre that provided his training and gratified his needs. It would take more than a moderately enjoyable dinner date with such a considerate, attentive listener as I to do that. His pleasure lay in the repetition of experience, which each time is revealed to him as something new.

Psychoanalysis is a situation of repetition. In ‘Remembering, repetition and working-through’, [1] Sigmund Freud remarks that the patient begins the treatment with a repetition. In the compulsion to repeat the painful patterns of the past, there is a kind of fidelity. The analysand is as faithful in exposing himself to the same kind of situations as my art critic is in his pleasurable exposure to certain forms of work. The origin of the repetition, of the compulsion to repeat, is lost, and this is the source of the compulsion. While what has happened is yet to be discovered in the course of the analysis, it is prefigured as it is repeated; though it happens before its first appearance can be known or told. Every story is recognised as a repetition, and that is the methodology of psychoanalysis. Events that seem without meaning, abstracted from more legible patterns, are translated into meaningful actions. Yet what the story is exactly remains to be discovered, or indeed, in the re-finding, constructed. Freud discusses the compulsion to repeat in his remarks preceding his speculation on a beyond of the pleasure principle, written in 1920. He says it does not differ as a phenomenon in neurotics or those who may be considered normal; life patterns are determined by earliest events and influences that are played out in all later relationships, including and especially the transference relationship. He gives his own examples:

The benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his protégés […] or the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises someone else into a position of great private or public authority […] then himself upsets that authority and replaces him with a new one; or again, the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion […] [2]

In Freud’s earlier work with hysterical patients, he identifies the transference, and it is as an impersonal relation, one that arises from the situation of the consulting-room, an impersonal relation with the doctor and then later, the analyst, while patterns repeating other relations are played out. They are remembered, repeated, and in working-through – durcharbeiten – there is the sense of something that has both surface and depth. In the transference, a particular and special form of repetition, ‘given to us as effigy and as relation to absence’, repetition is confronted, traced through an arduous recounting in the course of psychoanalytic treatment. It is an insistence of speech that returns to the analysand through his or her mis-identification of the analyst as other or indeed, a series of others. There is a re-enactment, and Jacques Lacan uses the term, from Pierre Janet, automatisme de répétition to describe the compulsion to repeat.  It is unconscious, and so it insists. Something returns to the subject; re-enacts, inflects, repeats. In his work of the 1950s Lacan uses the term ‘insistence’ to refer to the compulsion to repeat, and in Seminar 3, he says that ‘repetition is fundamentally the insistence of speech’, as certain signifiers make their perpetual return. [3] Every act, every acting-out, is included in a context of speech. Let me give you an example, from a case history, recounted at a conference. A woman goes into analysis after her lover, Yves, leaves her. In three years of analysis, having chosen her vacations to coincide with those of her analyst, she travels to Yugoslavia, Yemen, and the Yucatan, all countries in which civil wars are raging. You will have noticed – as did her analyst, to be sure, that all the countries’ names begin with the letter Y, as does the name of her former lover. It is an example of the textual nature of the unconscious, of the agency of the letter, Y and Y and Y; it repeats, why?

Remembering in analysis is more than a system of causal retrieval. It works backwards, unearthing retrospective organization. What is remembered is offered to the analyst as a token of love, a sign of good faith. The analysand has abandoned the self to the relation with the analyst, who must be believed to be deserving of trust, as trustworthy as one who is loved – the result of the transference - should be. It is unthinkable that one to whom so much has been given should not sustain it, and yet this is one of the terrors of analysis – the fear of misunderstanding, gossip, becoming a case history, and worse still, knowing about it and even worse than that, not being interesting enough for one’s story to be repeated. The analysand wonders if s/he is spoken of, both fears and desires it. If the transference has a form that repeats a relation from the past, it is neither illusion nor lie. It must be accepted by the analyst as a relationship with real components, but one with which the analyst must refuse to engage. In declining the seductive advance of the analysand, the relation cannot be rejected and must be taken as the compass with which to guide the treatment. It is a series of advances and retreats, covering ground already covered, then withdrawing in evasion, declining too ready an interpretation, which must be articulated by the analysand him-/herself. Yet the transference, in which the compulsion to repeat shows itself, is not an encounter in which one may make good what has gone wrong in the past, a rendezvous that one can keep at last. What is repeated is what has failed, in a search for the event after the event.

In Studies on Hysteria, Freud likens the movement of psychoanalytic speech to the zigzag of the knight’s move in chess. [4] The only piece that can move at the start of the game, the knight can move two squares vertically and one square horizontally, or two squares horizontally and one vertically; a complete move is like the letter L. Lacan makes an analogy with a see-saw in his first seminar, on Freud’s techniques: in either case, there is necessary movement, the movement of working-through, durcharbeiten, as neither repetition nor progress. It is a labour, and each act, every word spoken, in an analysis is taken as a repetition, or the character of a repetition, but what it repeats remains to be discovered in the durcharbeiten of the analysis. Répetition, in French, can mean a rehearsal: a preparation for an event yet to happen, which will, at the moment of occurring, have happened already, repeatedly. Repetition is a staging, in the ‘pure time of the thing, and as such it can produce the thing within a certain modulation, whose material support can be anything’. [5] The enactment is a repetition, yet that is the only way forward. A scene is repeated, and it is a second version of a scene that has happened elsewhere.

In the encounter with the work of art, the viewer’s pleasure may lie in the repetition of experience, which each time is revealed to him/her as something new. It is as though each viewing of what has been found to give pleasure once is invested with some variation that serves to confirm what is known about it already. The original staging of ‘seduction’ is repeated, but does its work unrecognized. Each new work is treated as a successor to the last, another point in an unfolding production, like the insistence of the letter in the signifying chain of the unconscious. What does not fit the first scene is either elided or compensated for, and if elision or compensation fails, then the new work encountered is rejected. Characteristics are identified each time, and the viewer’s ability to successfully make the identification enriches or ensures the value of the work. The secondary work, the second encountered, is enhanced by the value of the first experience, which is mediated by other estimations (the market, art history, the evaluations of others), as well as the viewer’s own psychic history. In his work of 1926, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud refers to the obsessional neurotic’s repetitive acts, when something that ‘has not happened in the desired way […] is undone by being repeated in a different way’, in the attempt to undo an experience (for the neurotic, a traumatic one). [6]

In his essay of 1968, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Michael Fried can break down the parts of a sculpture by Anthony Caro, into ‘the mutual and naked juxtaposition of the I-beams, girders, cylinders, lengths of piping, sheet metal and grill which it comprises’, with the attention to detail of fetishist or obsessional. [7] His pleasure lies in the inflection of one part by another, in their relation to each other rather than in any separate identity. He is faithful to the work. How could it be otherwise when the work offers itself so completely each time, compelling, present? The works he loves lead to his experience of:

Endlessness, of inexhaustibility, of being able to go on and on […] the material itself confronts one in all its literalness, its objectivity, its absence of anything beyond itself.

The work has constancy, and to the work, he is constant. Anything else, he might say, would be an illusion, a performance of a relationship for other spectators. It is as though something is recognized in a work that is at once particular to the work and particular to a memory or experience of the viewer. The latter might be identified though the source has been repressed, sublimated in the investment of belief in the power of the work, rather than in the power of memory. It is as though an emotional impulse is located in the presence of the successful work of art, whose success hinges on a denial of any event outside it, while completely representing it.

One may hope for a chance meeting with a work, a meeting that may lead to further encounters (if the relationship really works, one might become an art historian), this time intentionally. The first successful meeting (as in, ‘I got on really well with that conceptual text work, recognizing myself in it) of such an arbitrary nature compels a series of rendezvous. After Freud visited the Dresden art gallery to view the Sistine Madonna, he wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays that he had finally begun to admire painting, whereas, before his encounter with the Sistina, he felt that ‘an admiration for art was only a silent understanding among people who don’t have much to do to rave about pictures painted by famous masters’. [8] His rendezvous with the work led to others. He admitted he was no connoisseur; rather, he was attracted by subject matter, what will give itself to interpretation, by its very resistance to comprehension of intention and identification with the artist. While in Rome in 1912, Freud was to visit the Moses of Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli every day.

Asssignations, however casual it might be to one’s advantage to make them seem, as though one has simply brushed against a work of art by chance, are made on the implicit understanding that one will follow another, until a shared repertoire of time and space is constructed around the relation one has consciously formed, and might try to deny. There is also a refusal to meet works of art, especially among those who might most particularly be expected to be interested in such meetings (I can only refer you to Freud’s essay on negation to explain this [9]). Once the self is rendered, the investment must be followed up, until payment of interest is exacted. Each meeting initiates a further advance towards the end of such meetings, whose form is also their content. The appointment to view is more than the framework of the relation; it is equally the relation itself, pleasurable or unpleasurable, made inescapable by one’s decision to cease to desire to escape it.

Meetings are arranged with works one has never met; blind dates, set up by photographs, journal articles, what others have to say, whose repetition will depend on attraction. These encounters are mediated by the types of place or persons therein, or the words used to evoke them. The taste of a gallerist or curator may be similar to one’s own – as vain or as neurotic. If one doesn’t know what one will meet, well, that can be exciting too; speculation on the yield of the encounter may provide a frisson of anticipation, may even provide the impulse to decide on going out in the first place.

The rendezvous may be repeated, ‘until a beyond of repetition may be reached’. The rendezvous implies that the encounter will reoccur, and once repeated can no longer be considered to be mere chance, coincidence. One work of art, then, may lead to the encounter with another. As yet, at first encounter, neither work of art nor viewer may be said to know each other, but the decision to meet the work indicates that the relation, whatever its outcome, has been formed, preliminary, halting, or embracing; indeed, the relation precedes the encounter and the encounter repeats the relation. One may be reluctant to acknowledge this, even as one’s steps lead closer, as in advancing, the relation is resisted. The resistance may demonstrate that the relation has begun. If to love is to wish to be loved, then one may hope that the work of art loves back, and in so doing, reveals something – a signification – about one’s self.

To return to the analyst, he is supposed to know, as a subject of desire. The transference effect is love, and while this opens the field of interpretation, it closes off the analysand from interpretation. The analyst does not love back, and neither does the work of art, but as analysand or viewer, one offers of oneself something that seeks a reply, a response, a return of the gift.  As Freud says, the finding of an object is always the re-finding of an object. [10] Or as Lacan might say, the re-finding of an object is always the finding of an object.

In his account of his voyage, Ulysses reminds us, like any good epic poet, that it is inadvisable to ‘re-tell a story already told’; in Greek, that is to ‘mythologise’ (muthologeuin). [11]Repetition, pure and simple, is opposed here to the performance of the storyteller, what is invented in the relation between speaker and listener. I have told you my story, and of course, it is not the first time I have told it. I repeat myself, falling back on the same themes, the same concerns, the same sources. Perhaps my inflexion has changed; the stress falls differently, or chronology is altered, and new material introduced.  I embellish the account with every repetition. Yet here, I have worked through, surface and depth, over time and in time, to time, my repertoire of repetition.

Notes:
1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Remembering, repetition and working-through (1914), SE XII, p.150.
2. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE XVIII, pp.1-64.
3. Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III. The Psychoses, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 242.
4. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893-1895), SE II, p.289.
5. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Freud’s papers on Technique.1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forester, New York: Norton, 1991, p.243.
6. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), SE XX, pp. 259-70.
7. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Artforum 5, June 1967, pp.12-23.
8. Sigmund Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans Tania and James Stern, London Hogarth Press, 1961.
9. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Negation’ (1925), SE XIX, pp. 235-41.
10. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (1901- 5), SE VII, p.222.
11. Marcel Detienne, Les Dieux d’Orphée, Paris: Gallimard, 1989, pp.18-19.