Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education

Dr. Derek Pigrum

Introduction

“The Chora is properly a mother, a nurse, a receptacle, a bearer of imprints…”(Derrida, 1998, p.233). These are “what tradition calls the figures—comparisons, images, metaphors—proposed by Timaeus”(ibid,p.233). One of the most difficult and obscure notions in Plato’s Timeaus (Zeyl, 2000) is that of the Chora. At the same time the word Chora itself means quite literally, place.
This paper attempts to give a more tangible form to Winnicott’s notion of ‘potential space’ as the source of all later creativity and cultural experience. What the author terms ‘charged’ transitional objects and ‘transitional practices’ are viewed as constitutive of the ‘potential space’ of the adult artist and the secondary school arts student (Pigrum, 2001, 2002). ‘Multi-mode’ use (Kress, 1997) modes of negation and the trope of ‘doing and undoing’ that transitional practices involve enables the artist and the secondary arts student to alter the charge of transitional objects and transgress signification in such a way as to constitute Winnicott’s two conditions for potential space, the external emotional environment and the presence of transitional objects( Winnicott, 1971) and allow for the regulated influx of what Kristeva terms the ‘semiotic chora’ into the ‘expression event’ (Guattari, 1995). The notion of the ‘semiotic chora’ is not to be equated with the unconscious “that is but the founding act of repression by which consciousness is established in the first place” (Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1995). The ‘semiotic chora’ is prior to this first place. It is a trace of events that are preserved in the non-conscious but which influence the subject without words or images as a kind of remainder or lack of the hypothetical mother-child unity, the initial thing that provides place and allows, by its withdrawal or absence the presencing of symbols.
A better understanding of both Winnicott’s notion of ‘potential space’, the ‘charged’ transitional object, and the arts classroom as place, as opposed to site, are essential to an understanding of creativity and improved provisions for secondary arts education. In the first section a brief overview of transitional practices is given followed by a section on Winnicott’s notion of ‘potential space’ as the source of all subsequent creative and cultural activity and experience. In the section that follows examples from the practices of writers and visual artists are used to illustrate the use of the ‘charged’ transitional object, essential to our understanding of the interwoven relationship between the inner and outer in the ‘potential space’ of the adult practitioner and the secondary school student. The studio of the late Francis Bacon, among others, is then used to illustrate how ‘charged’ transitional objects are layered in such a way as to produce different ‘charges’ that constitute the studio as place, or choric receptacle, imprint and nurse.
This is followed by a discussion of what can be learned from the place of the artist’s studio to enhance the potential for creative thought and action in the arts classroom in secondary and further education. In the final section it is argued that the transitional practices of artists and writers help to avoid the premature closure of ideas and allow the influx of Kristeva’s ‘semiotic chora’ into the art work. This notion helps us to better understand the appearance in creative activity of what Guattari (1995) has termed the ‘expression event’(see Pigrum, 2002). In the conclusion some of the main ideas are summarized and discussed in relation to the principles in art and design education of difference, plurality and independent thought produced by Swift and Steers (see Steers, 2004).
Transitional Practices in the Arts
The term transitional practices covers four registers of transitional idea generation, development and modification identified by the author in the work of visual artists, architects, graphic designers and writers ( see Pigrum 2001and 2002). The transactional register is based on communicative action involving writing, drawing, diagramming and speech between practitioners in response to an immediate task. Primarily all transitional registers are acquired, like speech genres in the social context, in this case in the social transactional register, then
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
internalised to become part of the practitioner’s habitus (Bourdieu, 2000), or disposition to think and act in certain ways in situations that call for creative solutions. The transferential register is the recording in drawing and/ or writing of an object or idea of particular interest to the subject that is subsequently carried over to present creative activity. The transferential register most often takes the form of the ‘supplementary memory device’ such as the note/sketchbook and journal. The transformational register is an unwinding of signifiers in a state of suspended awareness where one thing is successively modified until an idea emerges that can form the basis of a more focused development. This register is closely linked to the notion of the ‘doodle’. The transpositional register is the displacement enacted in the condensed realisation of an idea in a rapid note or sketch, or both, that is subject to further transitional exploration, modification and development (see Pigrum, 2001).
These registers enable both the expert practitioner and the student to respond adaptively to idea generation and development. The hallmark of all the registers is a degree of indeterminacy, provisionality and non fnito signification in which all inessentials are omitted. The registers are open to the use of more than one signifying mode and as such constitute what Kress ( 1997) terms a ‘multi-mode’ object. In the registers modes of negation are employed ranging from transformational negation to radical negation where the surface of inscription is destroyed. The author believes that this openness to destruction enhances the practitioner’s and student’s ability to make and unmake, bind and unbind the original idea (see Pigrum, 2001, 2002). Thus, transitional practices form, what the author has termed, the ‘Gegenwerk’( see Pigrum, 2002) that has the meaning of the work towards the final work but aslo the‘counter-work or counter-finite’ (Valery, 2003, vol.1, p.48).
i
Potential Space
To be born at all is to be born as a separate being with its own place. There is no parturition only from within place. But if this is true what prompted Winnicott’s insight that ‘there is no such thing as the infant’(Winnicott 1971). The answer lies in the total dependency on the mother that gives the infant the illusion of oneness, of total unity with the mother. This unity is a compound that the child creates through the illusion that internal and external reality are one. An important role of the mother is initially to protect the infant from a premature awareness of separateness. This begins to change when the mother creates a space for the child in which the use of transitional objects enables the child to slowly separate from the mother. This space is termed ‘potential space’, where the infant destroys the internal object (phantasy) of the mother/child unity and discovers the external world as ‘other-than-me’(Winnicott, 1971). In this space the infant ‘drops out’ of the omnipotent internal object of mother/child unity into the arms of a potential or transitional object that is a symbol of the external mother, the other. Once the child enters the symbolic order “the immediacy of the pre-symbolic real is lost for ever, the true object of desire becomes impossible…we are submerged in the universe of signs” ( Zizek, 1996, p.95).
In ‘normal’ development the individual infant, child, or adult develop their own capacity to generate potential space. ‘Potential space’ is, as Winnicott states “an intermediate area of experiencing that lies between the inner world, inner psychic reality and actual or external reality”(in Ogden, 1998, p. 205). Transitional object use in ‘potential space’ is a “highly charged activity involving the use and animation of transitional objects. They are transitional in that they help us to bridge or effect a passage, across gaps in continuity, between the compelling illusion of the unity of the mother and child to the anxiety produced by her perceived absence and the process of separation. Within this space or place ‘imagination can develop’ (Ogden, 1998, p. 214). Imagination is the result of the transformation phantasy undergoes when it is brought into ‘potential space’. In ‘potential space’ phantasy is brought into “a place from which to become aware…before there is such a place, a phantasy object is a static thing in itself, representing a static thing in itself (in Ogden, 1998, p. 234). In other words it is the operation of projection, or omnipotence that creates and maintains the illusion of mother /child unity and an external world that exists because of the infant
A close reading of Winnicott provides the link between transitional practices in the studio or classroom and transitional phenomena in the early creation of ‘potential space’. A key notion here is the non- distinction between the found and the created. Winnicott states “the mother places the actual breast just there where the infant is ready to create, and at the right moment” (italics are mine) (Winnicott, 1996/1971) p.11). Winnicott goes on to state that “this is never
2
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
accompanied by the question ‘did you conceive of this or was it presented from without’” ( ibid,p.12). The non-existence of this question lies at the root of our belief that, as Nietzsche stated “the art work appears as if by magic” (in Schaeffer, 1992, p.225) or rather as a product purely of the mind. The relationship, in creative thinking between what is ready-to-hand or found and what is conceived of would appear to be very similar to the ‘primary creativity’ of the infant. This suggests a relationship between what is objectively perceived and what is subjectively conceived of in the intermediate place of ‘potential space’ as based on two external conditions; “the external emotional environment and the physical environment such as the transitional object or objects”(Winnicott, 1996/1971,p. 13). It is the authors belief that these two conditions merge into one in adult ‘potential space’. The external physical place, replete with ‘charged’ transitional objects provides the emotional environment that in infancy was constituted by what Winnicott termed ‘the good enough mother’. The ‘good enough mother’ helps the child create ‘potential space’ and overcome the insecurity of separation and symbol acquisition that allows the child to destroy the inner object of mother-child unity. Although beyond the scope of this paper to develop in any detail the author has conceived the notion of the ‘good enough teacher’(see Pigrum, 2001) who supports and helps the student overcome the sense of insecurity engendered by the transgression of signifiers involved in transitional practices.
Winnicott’s (1971) notion of ‘potential space’ is unfortunately very vague, although Ogden (1986) has gone a long way in giving it more clarity
What follows is an attempt to further clarify the notion of ‘potential space’ by revealing its operation between ‘charged’ transitional objects and the physical place of the artists studio. A place where these objects take on some of the qualities Winnicott attributes to early transitional object use. In other words external place and the transitional objects present within it remain of central imporance to the way we mediate between inner and outer in adult potential space. The author believes this has crucial and overlooked implications both for our understanding of the creative processes of expert practitioners and for arts education.
t
The ‘Charged’ Transitional Object
Oswald Stimm the Austrian sculptor talked to the author about the ‘charge’ that certain objects in the studio have for him (see Pigrum, 2001). Bacon, as we shall shortly see, also had a “physical stock of images”(Russell, 1979, p. 24) in his studio. The use of the word ‘charge’ here is a metaphor for a response to a qualitative content or what Whitehead called an ‘element of impetus’ (in Mays, 1959, p.218). However, unlike Whitehead no direct parallel is being made to the way physical systems behave when certain charges are produced in them.
Transitional objects/images have a particular sensory character that produces an emotional/ cognitive response that draws the image into a passage of transitional events in the creative process. Along the route of these events the object or image may be altered in some way (transformational negation) or be destroyed (radical negation) or quite simply survive intact (see Pigrum, 2001).
It is probable that the ‘charge’ the object appears to emit is based on previous inferences, on sedimented layers of experience, one layer forming the context by which the other layers take on significance. It is also conceivable that ‘charged’ transitional objects are a form of what Freud termed parapraxes “moments when our unconscious reveals itself’ between the lines’ as it were’ (in Sheratt, 2002, p.52). The contexts and the level of the ‘charge’ would seem to be complex and variable.
The playwright Harold Pinter states that such a ‘flashpoint image triggered the play ‘TheCaretakers’. Pinter states that he allows such images “to evolve gradually and transforms it into something that conforms to his own continuing obsessions’ (Billington, 1997, p. 116). For Pinter, as for many visual artists and designers the ‘charged’ or ‘flashpoint’ image is rooted in the concreteness, particularity and ‘ready-to-hand’ nature of everyday life. Such objects would seem to operate like a clue that can be followed but, as Pinter states “the crucial thing is to get the clue in the first place, to…have a given. If I don’t have that I am in the desert” (ibid, p.242).
The route of the ‘charged’ transitional image/ object can result in a form of negation that eliminates it as a separate entity. Schwitters, describing his own creative process (Schaffensprocess), stated “I find an object, know that it belongs on my Merzsäule (Merz column) take it with me, stick it on, cover it with glue, paint it in a way that harmonizes with
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
the rhythm and effect of the whole. Then one day it turns out that some new direction has to be taken that will partly or completely be achieved over the body of this object. In this way things are entirely or partly overlaid becoming clear signs of their degradation or devaluation (entwertung) as separate entities” (Krempel, 2000. p.267). Bacon’s transitional practices also assumed that the object/image would not go unscathed in his studio.
Pinter jots down fragments of overheard conversation on ‘ready-to-hand’ pieces of paper. This then develops into a typed sketch and from there into a first draft. In the very process of writing, things emerge that themselves become ‘charged’ transitional objects and controlling metaphors.
The reason why some things are of interest to us and not others is a complex issue related perhaps to what Winnicott describes as some kind of perpetual re-tracing of something that will always be important to us. This ‘something’ would seem to continually circulate in what Valery termed “a sphere of combinations—as a group of movements around habitual representations”(Valery, 2003. Vol. 1, p. 94).
An aspect of transitional object use in ‘potential space’ in childhood, and later creative activity, is the dispensability, or openness to destruction of the transitional object. The draft, can be ruthlessly re-written and pruned, the sketch done on the back of an envelope can be discarded or left in the workplace to get damaged and dirty.
The author believes the route of the ‘charged’ object in the individuals ‘potential space’ follows closely the pattern of Winnicott’s notion of the qualities of early transitional phenomena. That is to say the subject relates to the ‘charge’ the perceptual object has for her. This ‘charge’ is related to the recognition of some form of habitual representation. In this sense it is found rather than placed in the world by the subject. The transitional object is subjected to modes of negation and alteration. Thus it survives this process in a changed form and is used by the subject.
The way writers, artists, architects and designers use ‘charged’ transitional objects offers us a crucial and overlooked clue as to how we might enhance creative activity in the classroom. The student, like the artist must ‘get a clue in the first place’ for without this initial ‘element of impetus’ the arts student, like the artist/writer is in Pinter’s ‘desert’.
Transitional practices give the student an awareness of the importance of such objects for their creative processes, of ways to record, discuss, explore and change those that they find ‘ready to hand’ and to engender, develop and reflect upon those that seem to come from some internal source.
In the next section we will see how this process operated in the physical place of the studio of Francis Bacon, arguably the most important European painter of the second half of the last century.
‘Layering Stuff’
It is beyond the scope of this paper to enter upon even a brief account of the under-researched phenomena of the artist’s studio, the architects and designers office and the writer’s room. Nevertheless, it is important to point to the social place of the Renaissance studio where transitional practices originated in, what Kristeva (1998) has described as a move from symbol to sign (see Pigrum, 2001, 2002). In the early nineteenth century the artist’s ‘atelier’ was very much a place for visitors where the artists work formed part of a ‘staged’ interior. By the end of the nineteenth century the artist studio had regained its character as a work-place. It begins to be read as a “representation of mental patterns…where (Representation Mentaler Muster) … from the array of things we can gain an insight into the worldview (Weltblick) of the artist “(Krempel, 2000, p.265).
Oswald Stimm has taken twelve years to ‘integrate’ the place of his studio, to create optimal conditions in which creative thinking and action can take place, where the hidden, or absenced is always returning or re-surfacing, producing as it does altered relationships and ‘charges’ (see Pigrum, 2001). Stoessel (1994) describes the “extraordinary interweave of drawing, painting, sculpture” in Giacometti’s studio (Stoessel, 1994 p.98). Stoessel states that Giacometti transformed the walls of his studio “into an over-dimensional piece of paper”(ibid, p. 83) in a constant process of transition reflecting “what pre-occupied the artist, as a mirror of the state of artistic concerns and problems” (ibid, p.84). He also suggests that the way sculptures in the studio were juxtaposed and re-arranged produced new solutions. Stimm hangs pictures by
4
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
people he has known on the walls of his studio to create a certain ‘temperature’ conducive to creative work (see Pigrum, 2001).
Bacon’s studio was an “ankle deep strew of books, photos, old shoes, paint tubes, rags etc., …like the partial physical manifestation of the mental compost”(Peppiatt, 1996, p. 203 or what Kempel, writing about Kurt Schwitter’s, describes as “a representation of mental patterns”. In Bacon’s case the author believes this pattern was a continual series of attunements, transformations, transmissions, transitions, exchanges and re-adjustments of proximity and distance, of levels or ‘layers of stuff’.
This stuff consisted of a paratactic collection of material that included commissioned photographs of friends, golf and x-ray manuals, film stills, reproductions of painting by artists such as Michelangelo, Valasquez, Rembrandt and many others, photographs from Muybridge’s work on human motion and of mouth and skin diseases. In this way Bacon’s studio was what Heidegger (1997) has termed a place of ‘gathering’ (versammeln) where things are drawn together within a bounded place. This gathered ‘stuff’ was inadvertently trampled, blemished, torn, stained, crumpled, folded, blotched and overlaid. In the work process Bacon would pick up something ‘ready-to hand’ and very precisely secure its fold or overlapping of another image with a pin or paper clip sometimes adding paint to a part of the image. Heidegger states “every entity that is to-hand has a different closeness, which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances (but by) Daseins circumspective concern (umsichtiges Besorgen) and its directionality (Ausrichtung) (in Casey, 1998, p. 262). Direction locates for example, equipment, tools, materials, drawings, and resources and works in a particular place; circumspective concern takes continual account of what is happening in the ‘near sphere’ of the artist. The combination of these factors brings together the ‘round-about-us’ of place. Bacon possessed a knowledge of the place of his studio that was a form of co-existence, of continual acquaintance “expressed in a matrix of habitual action” (Casey, 1998). As Winnicott states of ‘potential space’ “essential to all this is continuity (in time) of the external emotional environment and of particular elements in the physical environment such as transitional objects or object”(Winnicott, 1971,p.13). Bacon knew his way around his studio with an awareness in which “being is synonymous with being situated” (Merleu Ponty, 1994/1962, p. 252).
Bacon’s transitional practices involved an ‘imprinting’ of ‘charged’ images below the level of consciousness, an imprinting kept alive by Bacon’s movement within the studio. This did not only effect a mere change in his position but given the nature of the ‘ankle-deep strew’, a reconstitution of place. His movement itself was ‘place productive’, because animated and reshuffled by his presence in its midst. Bacon’s studio corresponded to Heidegger’s notion of “place-as-pragmatic-as the realm of worked-on-things”(in Casey, 1998, p. 246). The place of Bacon’s studio can be conceived as a particular form of the chora as a receiving principle, a receptacle where material was altered or imprinted, an imprinting that operated as a mid-wife or nurse to his final work. Aspects of the ‘ready-to-hand’ images can be identified in the final work (see Steffan, 2003). But what can we learn about the place of the arts classroom from the example provided by Bacon’s and other studio places.
The ‘Place’ of the Arts Classroom
It is not the chaos of Bacon’s studio but the function of the ‘layering of stuff’ that is instructive for the arts classroom. The essential property of this layering is ‘connectivity’; the power of the way place is organized to produce connections and links between diverse entities or events. The author conceives of the place of the arts classroom as a topos of connections and, following Casey, as “a reservoir of connections yet to come” (Casey 1998, p. 47-48). This is not restricted to what is on the walls of the classroom but of the place of the classroom as an active source of creative inspiration. In this view what defines the classroom, as a ‘place’ is the relations of the student and the teacher to objects in transition. The arts classroom is a place where entities are always in excess of what the individual student creates and as such exist in transition rather than stasis. In such a classroom the state of all the artistic concerns, labour, problems and solutions that take place there are present, not as a fixed configuration of objects but in an ever -changing relationships of near and far, juxtaposition, overlap and dispersion. In the classroom as place the individual student pursues interests modified by the responses, ideas and suggestions of others in practical dialogue in response to an immediate task. Drawing and the use of other signifiers accompany this dialogue very often, (see Pigrum 2001). Conceived of in this way the place of the classroom closely shadows the configurations of the artists studio
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
where nothing is ever seen alone but always in relation to other things. In the artists studio the ‘charge’ of transitional objects is altered by receiving the imprint of layering, overlapping and juxtaposition produced by a continual change of the constellations of objects.
In secondary and further arts education we often reduce the notion of place to ‘site’. In this ‘site’ teaching and learning are largely considered, as ideal relation’s independent of place, where to be in the classroom is merely a formal identity of position. Casey states that “such formal identity is featureless…site as situs is construed as ‘abstract space’ and thus as something entirely extrinsic to “what is sited”(Casey, 1998, p. 178). This is a notion of the classroom ”grasped in terms of a generalizable model of functioning” (ibid, p.185). Site is an antidote to the plenitude of place where all discrete phenomena are subordinated to mind rather than to the concrete basis of mental representations themselves.
The ‘Semiotic Chora’
Kristeva’s ‘semiotic chora’ is the pre-symbolic maternal place, that “precedes and underlies figuration” (Arnett, 1998,p. 159) or “the nurse of all becoming” (Plato, 2000). It is like Freud’s Id and Lacan’s ‘real’. As Winnicott states “the real is not the exterior world, it is the anatomy, it is linked to the whole body…Freud’s Id, this is the real” (Winnicott, 1965, p.7). Fink describes it as a “sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, the phase of illusory unity with the mother where, as Lacan states “the interior and the exterior are linked” (in Lichtenberg- Ettinger, 1995). Eagelton, writing about Zizek states that it is a “super signifier whose function is just to point to the fact that the system can’t be totalised…but its absence is what organizes the whole system, and so it is a kind of presence within it”(Eagelton, 2003,p. 198).
Kristeva (1986, 1998) understands the semiotic in its Greek sense of the precursory sign, and imprint. The semiotic, in the sense she uses it, does not have the positionality of the symbolic but is the pre-condition for the acquisition of the symbolic function, “the place that allows for all positioning’ (Arnett, 1998, p. 161). As Sini states “that which allows a sign to be a sign is not a sign (in Carrera, 1998, p. 50). Sini’s definition of the symbol, or symbolon helps here. With the acquisition of the symbolic function we become “the fragment of a wholeness that is not or is no longer…the symbolic relation: the crack, the fracture that connects and separates us from the totality that always eludes us since we exist only in its broken margin, in its nothing” (in Carrera, 1998, p. 57).
The ‘semiotic chora’ is a non-signifier, something that is an ‘empty signifier’, a permanent lack, remainder, or absence. As Zizek states “in order for the series of signifiers to signify something…there must be a signifier (a something) which stands for nothing’, a signifying element that stands…for absence”(Zizek, 1996,p.42). The ‘semiotic chora’ makes place for the “uniqueness…beyond image, beyond thought and beyond memory “(Lichtenberg-Ettinger, 1995) of the subject.
Through the use of transitional phenomena in ‘potential space’ the child creates a place in relation to the ‘semiotic chora’, and thus necessarily outside of it. However, the identity of the subject is not fully contained in the symbolic order. There is always a remainder, a lack that is the ‘semiotic chora’.
As already described ‘potential space’ marks a threshold between the semiotic and the symbolic. Kristeva states that “in artistic practices the semiotic--the pre-condition of the symbolic--is revealed as that which disrupts the symbolic and in this way “the semioic can return through the symbolic system it brings about”(italics are mine) (ibid p.105). Although ‘potential space’ is created by transitional use of symbols, the semiotic that precedes it continually transgresses it bringing about various transformations of creative signifying practices. In ‘potential space’ what “remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic” (ibid, p.113). Kristeva takes a quite different view here to that of both Lacan (see Fink, 1995, Chaitin 1986) and Zizeck (1996) who claim that an influx of the semiotic or ‘real’ precipitates the subject into psychosis. That the subject does not vanish into psychosis when this happens in artistic practices is because the influx of the semiotic is encompassed by ‘potential space’ that, although permeable, continues to ensure the position of the subject in a transitional process. This process is the condition of the functioning of ‘potential space’ and enables us to distance ourselves from the semiotic. In other words the transgression of the semiotic serves signification, “even when it dislocates it” (ibid, p.116). Kristeva states that “the very practice of art necessitates reinvesting the maternal (or semiotic) chora so that it transgresses the symbolic order (italics and brackets are mine) (ibid p. 115). Its incursion into
t
6
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
signification is what Steiner (2002) terms’ primary creation’ and Guattari (1995) the ‘expression event’ which has all the hallmarks of a pre-symbolic immediacy (see Pigrum, 2002).
The author believes that it is primarily transitional practices that both regulate and create the conditions for the influx of the ‘semiotic chora’.
To enter the symbolic is to take up a position. To transgress the symbolic is not to take up a position but to remain open and, by ‘multi-mode’ use and negation of the signifier, to forestall closure.
Kristeva already conceives of the “passage from one sign system to another” as part of this destabilization that admits the influx of the semiotic. However, she restricts herself to the linguistic sign and misses the broader implications of what Kress (1997) has termed ‘multi-mode’ use. Kress claims that education divests us of ‘multi-mode’ use, while the author claims that it is reinvested in transitional ‘multi-mode’ practices. An examination of the draft manuscripts of Pushkin, where drawing and writing are inextricably interwoven, is an example of the transgressive dynamic of ‘multi-mode’ use (see Pigrum, 2001). Such examples abound in the transitional practices of artists and writers (see Pigrum, 2001, 2002)
It is through the transgressive characteristics of transitional practices that the subject unlearns the “the contiguity between signifier and signified”(Kristeva, 1986,p. 71) and learns instead to work with indeterminacy, with non-finito forms of signification where all inessentials are omitted, with ambiguity, provisionality and the forestalling of closure. It is the transgressivity of transitional practices that reinvest the ‘semiotic chora’.
Transitional practices constitute transgression as ‘multi-mode use’, doing and undoing, and modes of negation that include the negation of the very surface of transcription, or the ‘charged’ object, as we saw in the practices of Francis Bacon. These transgressions constitute transitional practices as possessing some of the qualities of original transitional object use and at he same time mediating between the symbolic and the semiotic by enabling the subject to distance herself from the products of transitional work, from the ‘Gegenwerk’ (see Pigrum, 2002)
This distance is achieved because the openness to modes of negation, and the use of ‘multi-modes’ constitute the ‘Gegenwerk’ of transitional practices as wok that does not yet represent value or as the sculptor Gerhard Mosswitzer states, “a value free zone” (Pigrum, 2001). It is work that emphasizes the dynamics of production and place over the actual product or finished work.
r
Conclusion
If we follow Winnicott creativity has its source in ‘potential space’, which depends on two main external conditions: the immediate emotional and physical environment and the presence of transitional objects in this space. The author has presented the view that these two conditions in a modified form remain constitutive of the ‘potential space’ of the adult practitioner in the arts and the arts student in secondary and further education. That is to say
the place of the studio and classroom as a receptacle for ‘gathering’ and ‘imprinting’ and as the nurse of idea generation, as a place-of appearance, of the birth of ideas, and of the presence and alteration of ‘charged’ transitional objects.
We have seen how Bacon repeated the gesture of sacrifice of the ‘charged’ transitional signifier by assigning it to chaos and potential destruction and of how ‘finding’ that which is ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘creating’ are interdependent activities. In German the closeness of to find and to invent lies in the words themselves, finden and Erfinden.
The classroom as ‘featureless site’ undermines the continuation of the founding gesture and conditions of potential space. The absence of the ‘charged’ transitional object undermines‘ the ‘self in processes. As Adorno states “deprived of the object (we have) the decay of the self”(in Sherratt, 2002, p. 228).
The reason why transitional practices are so widely used in artistic production is because they mirror and activate what Freud termed the two great tendencies of the life of the mind, binding and unbinding. This binding and unbinding is achieved through the transgressive aspects of transitional practices, transgressions that, following Kristeva, create the conditions for the regulated influx of the ‘semiotic chora’ into the ‘expression event’ producing the incommensurability of the art work as an expression of ‘otherness’. Unlike modernist arts pedagogy, transitional practices do not create a particular ‘look’ but foster the growth and development of individual ‘potential space’. It is the author’s belief that the acquisition of
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
transitional practices and a change from ‘site’ to ‘place’ of the arts classroom would go a long way towards improving the provisions of the National Curriculum for Art and Design.
Transitional practices would constitute a practical dimension of the three principles of difference, plurality and independent thought outlined by Swift and Steers (1997). Their emphasis“ is on the learner and learning, negotiating what they learn, learning how to learn, and understanding knowledge as a multiplicity of changing hypotheses or theories…”(in Steers, 2004, p.40). The emphasis Swift and Steers place upon “opportunities for learners to understand art and design as something that can actually matter in their lives and has relevance to present and future action” (ibid, p. 40) is central to Winnicott’s notion of ‘potential space’ as the source of cultural experience, and what he termed ‘creative life’ and ‘true self organization”(Winnicott 1971, p. 14). If we look at Swift and Steers three principles in the light of transitional practices we see that the dialogic nature of the transactional register gives a practical slant to their notion of difference as “a locus for action and discussion at a personal and social level” (ibid p.40). The transferential and transformational register involve research and note/sketch books and journals as ‘supplementary memory devices’ that addresses the principle of plurality as one of a “variety of available methods, means, and solutions for approaching any issue” (ibid.). The entire spectrum of transitional practices can be seen in the light of the principle of the development of independent thought “that develops individuality, the capacity to challenge received opinion, and fosters creativity through introspection into the nature of learning and teaching” (ibid).
Transitional practices are central to an understanding of what Winnicott meant by ‘potential space’ as the source of all subsequent creative activity. Transitional practices transgress signification in the direction of the ‘semiotic chora’ and in this way help us to understand the regulative capacity of ‘potential space’ as a mediation between the symbolic and the semiotic. In order to develop an approach to arts education and cultural experience not subservient to what Swift and Steers call ‘the drab routines of school art’, a deeper understanding is needed of the way ‘potential space’, the physical place of the studio and the classroom, and the semiotic chora are interwoven.
Dr. Derek Pigrum
University of Bath and Vienna International School Austria
Zedlitzgasse 3/13
1010 Vienna
Austria
e-mail address dpigrum@vis.ac.at
References
Arnett, M. A (1998) A metaphor of the Unspoken: Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora in Silverman, J (ed) Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier. pp.154-166. London: Routledge.
Billington, M (1997) The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. London: Faber and Faber.
Boothby, R (2001) Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan. London: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Transl. from the French by R. Nice. Stanford: California Univ. Press
Cacciari, M (1996) Postumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point. Transl. from the Italian by Rodger Friedman. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press.
Carrera, A ( 1998) Consequences of Unlimited Semiosis: Carlo Sini’s Metaphysics of the Sign and Semiotical Hermeneutics in Silverman, J (ed) Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier. pp. 48-62. London: Routledge
Casey, E. S (1998)The fate of place” A Philisophical History. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Chaitin, T.H (1986) Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan. Cambridge: Camridge Univ. Press.
Derrida, J (1998) The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances. Wolfreys, J (ed). Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press.
8
Transitional Practices and Place: ‘Potential Space’, the Place of the classroom and the ‘Semiotic
Chora’ in Secondary Arts Education
Eagleton, T (2003) Figures of Dissent. London: Verso
Fink, B (1995) The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press.
Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Sydney. Power Publications.
Heidegger, M (1997) Origin of the Work of Art:Poetry, Language, Thought. Transl. from the German by Albert Hofstädter. New York: Harper Row.
Krempel, U (2000) Atelier Merzbau. In Meyer-Büsers and Orchard K. (ed) Merz. pp. 260-269.
Kress, G. (1997) Before Writing: Re-Thinking the paths to literacy. London. Routledge.
Kristeva, J (1986) The kristeva Reader.(ed) Moi, T. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kristeva, J (1998) Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary in Silverman, J (ed). Cultural Semiosis: Tracing the Signifier. London: Routledge.
Lichtenberg-Ettinger, B (1995) Woman as Objet a Between Phantasy and Art. Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts. No.6 London: Academy Editions.
Mays, W (19590 The Philosophy of Whitehead. London: Allen & Unwin.
Merleau-Ponty, M (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. Transl. from the French by Colin Smith. London: Routledge.
Ogden, T. H (1986) The matrix of the Mind:object Relations and Psychoanalytic Dialogue. London: Karnac Books.
Peppiatt, M (1996) Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma. London: Phoenix Giant.
Pigrum, D. (2001). Transitional Drawing as a Tool for Generating, Developing and Modifying Ideas: Towards a Programme for Education. Ph.D Thesis. University of Bath.
Pigrum, D (2002) ‘Das Gegenwerk’: Transitonal Practices in the Arts-Towards a Programme for Education. Protocol of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain Annual Conference. OxfordUniv. New College.
Plato (2000) Timeaus. Transl. from the Ancient Greek by Donald, J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Russell, J (1979) Francis Bacon. London: Thames and Hudson.
Schaeffer, J-M. (2000). Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. Trans. from the French by S. Rendall. Originally publ. in 1992. New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press.
Steers, J (2004) Art and Design. in White, J (ed) Re-thinking the School Curriculum: Values, Aims and Purposes. pp. 30—44. London: Routledge.
Steiner, G. (2002). Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990. London: Faber & Faber.
Steffan, B (ed) (2003) Fransis Bacon and the Tradition of Art. Transl. from the Italian by Christopher Roth. New York: Rizzoli
Sherratt, Y (2002) Adorno’s Positive Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Solomon,R, C. and Stone, L.D (2002) On ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions. Journal for the Theory Of Social Behaviour. Vol 32, No 4, Dec. 2002. pp. 417-435.
Winnicott, D. W (1991/1971) Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.
Wuthenow, R-R (1997) Paul Valery: zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag.
Valery, P (2000)Cahiers/Notebooks, Vol. 1 & 2. B.Stimpson (ed) Transl. P. Gifford. Frankfurt am Main: Lang Verlag.
Zizek, S (1996) The Indivisible Remainder: an Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso