Odalis Valdivieso — Nearly Contemporary

Nov. 25, 2017 — Feb. 08, 2018

Marcus Steinweg NOT WITHOUT GHOSTS For Odalis

1. BALTIMORE IN THE EARLY MORNING Lacan looks out the window. He’s tired. What he sees is in his head. Psychoanalysis does not coincide with the subject’s foreclosure. It directs its attention to the ghosts that occupy it. The question of the unconscious converges with that of “another subject.”1 It’s a question of demons. Something within me speaks that isn’t me. The subject understands itself to be ruled by an entity that it does not control. Its status as subject begins to falter. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a subject at all. The question of the subject is tied to the question of the unconscious, which correlates with the question of demons. A glance out the window becomes a glance into the interior: “I could see Baltimore through the window and it was a very interesting moment because it was not quite daylight and a neon sign indicated to me every minute the change of time, and naturally there was heavy traffic and I remarked to myself that exactly all that I could see, except for some trees in the distance, was the result of thoughts, actively thinking thoughts, where the function played by the subjects was not completely obvious. In any case the so-called Dasein, as a definition of the subject, was there in this rather intermittent or fading spectator. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.”2 The tired analyst is waylaid by a wakeful demon. The unconscious has taken over his conscious. It is, as Lacan never tired of saying, structured like a language. The subject is spoken by it, writes Heidegger in On the Way to Language (1959): “language speaks.”3 It speaks in speaking humans, as a demon whom Socrates had already heard speaking in himself. Baltimore in the early morning witnesses the subject’s loss of self as a guarantor of meaning. Thought is not a “natural process.”4 It transpires as a break with normal procedures, which is why it attains the status of a sin in Christian theology. God is unconscious, which means he doesn’t exist, yet he doesn’t stop speaking. Not as inner truth, but as the indication of its absence. Because there is no truth in the unconscious. There is nothing but a babbling demon whose babbling represents a sort of surrogate truth, in order to convince the subject “that something always thinks.”5

2. A WALK Robert Walser describes the walk as an event that leads the “person who is out walking” to the brink of an abyss: “Mysterious and secretly there prowl at the walker’s heels all kinds of beautiful subtle walker’s thoughts, such as make him stand in his ardent and regardless tracks and listen, so that he will again and again be confused and startled by curious impressions and bewitchings of spirit power, and he has the feeling that he must sink all of a sudden into the earth, or that before his dazzled, bewildered thinker’s and poet’s eyes an abyss has opened. His head wants to fall off, and his otherwise so lively arms and legs are as benumbed. Countryside and people, sounds and colors, faces and farms, clouds and sunlight swirl all around him like diagrams, and he must ask himself: “Where am I?”6 The ground can slip out from under a walker’s feet. His certainties blur. He begins to keep company with ghosts that haunt him like truths in order to confront him with the question of his stance in the world: “chaos begins, and the orders vanish.”7 The most everyday realities come undone on a walk. As if in a frenzy, the walker is whisked away from the familiar into an exterior that unlocks a variety of impressions for him, only to withdraw anew to make room for the advancing ghosts who threaten to drag him into nothingness. The chaotic character of the world comes to light. The disappearance of the orders demonstrates its instability. It is compromised—like the walker, who begins to grasp that he is a ghost among ghosts. Not an I or a self or a subject, just a vanishing phantom. How soothing it is to be almost nothing, haze or cloud “there accompanies the walker always something remarkable, some food for thought, something fantastic, and he would be foolish if he did not notice this spiritual side, or even thrust it away; rather, he welcomes all curious and peculiar phenomena, becomes their friend and brother, because they delight him; he makes them into formed and substantial bodies, gives them structure and soul just as they for their part instruct and inspire him.”8 Although the walk is like delirium, it is reconciled with unfamiliar moments of truth. Without falling out of reality, the walker wanders into the unknown. At the moment his cosmos falls apart, the walker experiences a sense of belonging in the a cosmic world . 3. MONSTROSITY The battle with the demon proves to be a battle with the self. The psychoanalyst is familiar with this conflict. Thought entails the struggle against the “shameful monstrosity of dogmatism,”9 as Barthes calls

it. Dogma, that’s us. The demon is in us. It’s not just the others who wander. This is the fundamental lesson of the Socratic method. We must struggle against ourselves to understand who we are. It is important to understand that the inner monster is not a force, but rather an exterior that dwells within me without belonging to me. Barthes knew that the struggle against dogmatism cannot be won. Its lives are without number. Beaten here, it continues with its mischief under another name there. There is nothing beyond dogmatism, no final truth. But there is the possibility of not resigning oneself to that fact. The monster never disappears, but it has its weaknesses. Now and then its influence wanes. Those are the moments when thought frees itself from its ghosts by marking them as such. 1 Jacques Lacan, “Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” Lecture, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, 18 October 1966. braungardt.trialectics.com/projects/psychoanalysis/lacans-life/lacans-baltimorelecture-1966/ (accessed 26 November 2017). 2 ibid. 3 Martin Heidegger, “Language” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971 [1950]), 189. 4 Lacan, “Of Structure as the Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever.” 5 ibid. 6 Robert Walser, The Walk, translated by Christopher Middleton (New York: Calder, 1957 [1917]) 80. 7 ibid. 8 ibid, 81. 9 Roland Barthes, Chronik, (Merve: Berlin, 2003), 34. Text: Marcus Steinweg Translation: Amanda DeMarco Image: Untitled, 2017. Ink-jet on cotton. 24x36 In.

Odalis Valdivieso — Nearly Contemporary Nov. 25, 2017 — Feb. 08, 2018 ArtCenter/South Florida — Windows@Walgreens 6700 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33141 Exhibitions and public programs at ArtCenter/South Florida are made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the City of Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council; the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners; and the State of Florida, Florida Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by Walgreens Company.