Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves

ACADEMIA Letters Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik Why were caves, dark, uncomfortable, damp places, so appealing to the people in the past? Something special, something mysterious and something weird went on in caves. Which discipline should we turn to explain why people do (and did) weird things? Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a theory, an ontology which confronts the speaking subject with the truth, lying beyond the wary appearances. This is key here. We, humans, dwell in a language (Fink, 1997: 173). As long as people are speaking beings, psychoanalysis is also relevant to archaeology. Humans are not just bodies that can crawl through caves, being affected by their materiality (Mlekuž, 2011). Those perceptions and experience of things and processes are already structured through the symbolic network of language. They also narrate their experience; they try to make sense of it, using language (but also other symbolic expressions). My approach here is heavily influenced by the work of Jacques Lacan, controversial French psychoanalyst, original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work. Lacan situates the functioning and internalization of experience in terms of the imaginarysymbolic-real triad, the three interlocked register that serves to situate subjectivity within a system of perception and in a dialogue with the external world (Lacan, 1998). The imaginary is the field of images, a realm of inherently deceptive surface appearances, that provide a sense of the whole and can be understood with no mediation. In contrast to the imaginary, the symbolic involves the formation of signifiers and language, which are are public, communal property. Symbolic is the domain of intersubjective relations, of ideological conventions, the acceptance of the law, rules, and restrictions, order of culture. Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik, [email protected] Citation: Mlekuz Vrhovnik, D. (2021). Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves. Academia Letters, Article 190. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL190. 1 Real is more tricky; in the Lacanian theory the real becomes that which resists representation, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is the aspect where words fail, and ‘the ineliminable residue of all articulation’ (Miller, 1998: 280), which may be approached, but never grasped. Slavoj Žižek (1989: 170) describes it using the metaphor of a cave, ‘the Real is as a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolical order — the lack around which the symbolical order is structured.’ What we experience as “reality” – not Lacanian real, but colloquial reality – is not simply “out there”, waiting for us to discover it. Rather, it is mediated by our symbolic universe. We, humans, are deeply immersed in a symbolic order. “Reality” stands for what Lacan called “the big Other”: the symbolic order, social world of meaning, linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, ideological conventions, the acceptance of the law, with its network of rules and practices that structure not only our psychic lives but also the way we relate to what we experience as normal (Fink, 1997: 24–26). In modernity, the meaning of the world is subjectivized; “objective reality” out there simply follows natural laws; and it is only we, humans, who project meanings onto it. However, this was not necessarily so in the past, as we archaeologist already know. “Reality” could be experienced as permeated by spiritual powers, and even natural phenomena can be perceived as the bearers of hidden meaning, the cosmos appearing to be controlled by a supreme intelligence. Caves could be imagined as a projection of subterranean architectural power that created the landscape. When encountering a cave, all of the meanings associated with it are symbolically overdetermined. In short, I perceive a cave, but this perception is given its specific spin by the word “cave” that resonates in it, and words always refer to some universal notions, for example, a geological phenomenon or an entrance to the underworld, a lair of some powerful entity, house of ancestors. A whole imaginary can be evoked simply by calling something a “cave”. This is the paradox of the symbolic overdetermination: when I encounter a cave, it is the signifier “cave” that confers the rich and complex texture of meaning that colours this perception. But there is always something more when we encounter the cave, some excess of meaning, that the signifier fails to fully comprehend. A gap, fissure in a landscape is simultaneously a gap in the symbolic order, where we encounter the limit of discourse. That can be described as a specific affective atmosphere, a sense of uneasiness, a feeling of being haunted, of other presences located at the edge of awareness. This is a touch of real, Lacanian real. A cave is an intrusion of something alien and unrecognizable, something that the usual grammar of the symbolic that conditions how to Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik, [email protected] Citation: Mlekuz Vrhovnik, D. (2021). Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves. Academia Letters, Article 190. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL190. 2 make meaning and how to proceed cannot fully fathom. This unsettling discomfort is something that Sigmund Freud, Immanuel Kant and Julia Kristeva explore in different but extremely interrelated ways through the concepts of the uncanny, the sublime and the abject. The uncanny feeling, or un-homely, das Unheimliche, as described by Sigmund Freud, is a sense of alienation and disorientation, where the taken for granted becomes weird, scary, haunted. For Freud uncanny ‘is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud, 2003: 623). The cave, where the monstrous landscape innards become exposed and tangible, is a perfect stage for uncanny. The cave as an un-homely home of something mysterious, a womb and a tomb at the same time. Being in a cave is like not being born yet, yet buried alive. And for Freud (2003: 241), ‘… the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all.’ Uncanny is a suspicion of the supernatural, a fear of the dark, of what lies beneath, of those things we cannot see or physically apprehend, but imagine to be there, as ghosts, ancestors, gods. The experience of ontological disruption is what Kant describes as sublime, an experience of something existing beyond the physical world, split between the mundane and an ethereal, dwarfing humanity and threatening our reason and understanding (Kant, 2000: 521–523). Sublime raises the feeling of insignificance of the self, the feel of humility as we are overwhelmed by some very big and powerful entity. Imagine coming across large subterranean chambers, an encounter of vast non-human architecture below the familiar landscape. There is something otherworldly about the sublime. The sublime is an encountering the inexpressible and unpresentable. However, this overwhelming majesty of nature, the violent explosion of its forces are perceived from a safe position, so that the subject is not immediately threatened by it. But when this aesthetic relationship with the environment becomes unbearable, when it is no longer pleasant and delightful, when it becomes threatening, it becomes abject (Kristeva, 1982). The abject refers to the human reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, between self and other. Abject highlight the ‘fragility of the symbolic order’ (Kristeva, 1982: 3). Horror and repulsion of the abject strive for protection to maintain this boundary. But abject is also ambiguous. Kristeva emphasizes the attraction the abject, a lure of the return of pre-symbolic oneness with the world. A descent into the cave, katábasis offers the brave access to superior knowledge, possession of extraordinary objects, and contact with the dead and gods, if he or she can survive the encounter as a subject. Lacan claims that the gods belong to the order of the Real (Lacan, 1998: 45). Notions of sacred, numinous are ways of approaching the subject of uncanny, sublime or abject. This is Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik, [email protected] Citation: Mlekuz Vrhovnik, D. (2021). Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves. Academia Letters, Article 190. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL190. 3 our effort to cover over the breakdowns and fissures (and subsequent reassertion of boundaries) associated with the abject, using the combination of images and words. For Kristeva, rituals reflect an effort to delineate the boundaries that surround the abject and protect the symbolic order from the pollution or chaos embodied by the abject (Kristeva, 1982: 17). Ritual is thus technology for creating and maintaining symbolic order and for keeping it separated from the abject. In this way it can be considered as an act that creates meaning, shared representations of the world, ordered symbolic universe, ‘big Other’ with norms, expectations, desires, prohibitions, regimes of representation, guarantees of meaning and other things that constitute human subjectivity and social order. Caves are rupture in the fabric of the world, where its monstrous innards become exposed and tangible. So with the caves, we are confronted with a big lack in the Other. And, as speaking beings, we have a difficult time tolerating this kind of lack of knowledge, this void, this gap. People cover those holes with something, often that very thing which defines how they engage the world. In the psychoanalysis, this is called fantasy, and we can see how these fantasies – cosmologies, myths – take so many different forms. However, fantasy is not the subject’s own, but the Other’s desire. This fantasy is an answer to the enigma of ‘Che vuoi?’, What do you want from me? What I am to you? How do you see mean? What I am for the others (Žižek, 2006: 40–60)? This is a fundamental fantasy, a fantasy which holds subjectivity together, covering up the hole in the real with the images and words. Answer to this question renders the subject’s constitutive position. The stuff that people fill the caves with, these fantasies, is also the stuff of archaeology. These fantasies are narrated – through myths, rituals, material practices, structured deposits. These fantasies, narratives on what is happening often say more about the culture itself, than the situation that the persons are narrating, they serve as a starting point into the way people in the past saw themselves and their position in the relation to the Other. References Fink B (1997) The Lacanian Subject : Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Freud S (2003) The Uncanny. London: Penguin. Lacan J (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI. New York: Norton. Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Dimitrij Mlekuz Vrhovnik, [email protected] Citation: Mlekuz Vrhovnik, D. (2021). Approaching weird: psychoanalysis and archaeology of caves. Academia Letters, Article 190. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL190. 4 Kant I (2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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