Engaging Baudrillard Conference, Swansea University, 4-6 September 2006

Abstract

Created to lead astray: Baudrillard’s seduction in contemporary artefacts

When Jean Baudrillard stated that the desire of the subject could only be matched by an object-seducer he opened a range possibilities for makers, particularly art and design practitioners. Capitalism and modern culture have provided material things with new qualities. Contemporary objects have become a focal point for the seductive experience: ranging from designer shoes and sport-cars to common household objects and the latest technological devices, these enticing ‘must haves’ lead viewers and consumers astray. Emerging disciplines such as captology, the study of how technologies persuade, and consumption studies have concentrated on the analysis of this phenomenon, if only from an experiential perspective rather than focusing on the appearance of the objects and their relational qualities. This paper will examine the characteristics of seduction, as defined by Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies and Seduction, and apply them to artefacts, using Surrealism, Phillippe Starck’s Juicy Salif and Jonathan Ive’s iPod as examples.

Paper

Why is it that I hopelessly, predictably, inevitably fall for certain objects? What is it about certain things that occupy all of my thought until I get hold of them, until I somehow possess them? What is it about these objects that seduces me? Why is it that, almost invariably, we all have something that seduces us individually? These were the questions I wanted to answer when I started my part-time PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, last October. Now, one year on, they remain the focus of my research. This project seeks to study the seductiveness of artefacts, but not in their historical or economic contexts. My research will not seek the truth about seduction (it would deceive me, anyway); or, indeed, an interpretation for the purposes of a PhD, which would kill it; or, again, its representation, which would be a flawed and false undertaking, if not impossible. I am a practising artist and this project is concerned with the practice of seduction, with its relational, mechanistic and subjective aspects, which I intend to examine through the study of its manifestation in artistic and psychoanalytic practices. Given that, it may be strange to come to a conference aiming to engage with Baudrillard’s thought, as many of his writings, including The Ecstasy of Communication (1988), Seduction (1991), and Fatal Strategies (1999), critique psychoanalysis. I want to explore the thorny relationship between Baudrillard and psychoanalysis, attempt to bring the two positions a little closer and develop a strategy to allow us to consider seduction in artefacts.

Seduction is a phenomenon; it is also a process, a strategy. It can be seen as a practice, as well. It is the latter that concerns this paper. Baudrillard’s understanding of seduction is polymorphous; to provide a fair exposition of his theorisation of this concept would require more than the time I have available. For the purposes of this paper, I will only select a few pointers from the wealth of his thought.

In The ecstasy of communication, he provides us with a reasonably accurate definition. He says: ’seduction is what seduces, and that’s that’ (1988: 57). The phenomenon’s understanding is arrived at through the process. He offers a few more pointers in his book Seduction (1991: 81): ‘…a mode of circulation that is itself secretive and ritualistic, a sort of immediate initiation that plays by its own rules….’ He also says: ‘to seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute oneself as illusion’ (1991: 69). Through reversible, challenging, dual techniques, seduction encourages a change of direction and leads one astray from what can be considered ‘right behaviour’ (as, in Baudrillard’s case, what he may define as ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’).

Baudrillard places seduction and interpretation in opposition and this is what his main critique of psychoanalysis is based upon. Whereas psychoanalysis allows for latent discourse (truth) to come through manifest discourse (appearance), seduction turns discourse away from truth. He argues that what leads a discourse to be seductive cannot be found in its hidden meaning but in its appearance. Seduction turns meaning into a game, whereas psychoanalysis’s aim is to eliminate seduction. Baudrillard wonders whether psychoanalysis is in itself a model of simulation. Are the effects of seduction beginning to work their damage into psychoanalysis through the realisation that the unconscious seduces mainly by its dreams and the id’s speech?

Let me take on his critique. As paradoxical as it may sound, I concur with and challenge Baudrillard’s position. Indeed, the unconscious seduces and this is why I maintain that in psychoanalysis, when thought of a practice, seduction takes place. Links between the practices of art and psychoanalysis are key to my project of research. Both are dominated by a range of idées reçues. In psychoanalysis, the popular belief is that hidden meaning or, in Baudrillard’s paraphrase of Freud, latent discourse (Baudrillard: 1991: 53), is what dominates the sessions. Manifest discourse, however, is also firmly at play through inflexions in speech, lapses, hums and ruffles. The analysand often wonders about the analyst: how she may be sitting, where she may be looking at… If we understand it as practice —instead of as a science, as a therapy or any of the other usual names— analysis is as much about interpretation as it is about itself, about its discourse.

When the analysand takes her place on the couch, the analyst sits at her head. In the presence of its absence, in its double mark, gaze —a seductive phenomenon according to Baudrillard (1988: 61)—, commands transference, that dual, challenging and complex relationship between analyst and analysand. Elements of a transferential relationship can also be found in the gallery space. Freud’s concept of scopophilia, where the act of looking (voyeurism or active scopophilia), and the experience of being looked at (exhibitionism or passive scopophilia), are associated with pleasure (Freud, 1949; Leader, 2002: 10-17) is particularly relevant in the artistic and psychoanalytic contexts. They both share properties with the mirror, ‘the realm of appearances where there’s nothing to see, where things [be it the analyst or the work] see you’ (Baudrillard, 1991: 64)

Right: Martin Creed Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000 (installation at Tate Britain) 5 seconds on/5 seconds off, Edition 2/electrical time switch. Centre and Left: Mike Nelson: Triple Bluff Canyon. Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 8 May to 4 July 2004

Seduction is a question of two (Fisher & Livingstone: 1998). Both art and psychoanalysis are relational practices, involving an analyst and an analysand, or a singular artefact and an individual viewer, meeting in specific contexts with particular rules of engagement, where almost anything could happen. The light could turn itself on and off, as in Martin Creed’s Work No 227. The whole space may have been taken up by a nightmarish vision, as in Mike Nelson’s complex installations. Both spaces are also dominated by dual rituals: calculated distance between viewer and work, precise positional relation between analyst and analysand. Beyond space, rituals and relationships, seduction emerges from the object, whether in the form of an analyst (for the analysand) or an artefact (for the viewer). The question is: how can objects lead someone astray?

In their paper Understanding the seductive experience, Khaslavsky and Sheddroff, exponents of Captology (the study of computers as persuasive technology), extract characteristics from an analysis of Phillipe Starck’s celebrated lemon squeezer, Juicy Salif. They argue that (1) Juicy Salif entices by diverting attention. This is mainly due to the object’s appearance. Why would a lemon squeezer look like this, why would it be made of plated aluminium or gold when the material may be corroded by the citrus’ acidic juice? Why these dimensions that do not fit in a standard kitchen cupboard? Why this shape that is not instantly recognizable as a citrus juicer? (2) Juicy Salif delivers a surprising novelty. Its function, its purpose is ambiguous. In my own house, Juicy Salif is displayed on top of the television and has never been in contact with a citrus fruit (and never will). (3) Juicy Salif goes beyond the obvious needs and expectations of a usual lemon juicer. Offered as a kitchen utensil, I bought an object of contemplation, something I think of as an artwork. (4) It creates an instinctive response, for example curiosity, or fear. It squeezes lemons but can be brandished as a menacing looking weapon. (5) It spouses values or connections to personal goals and (6) promises to fulfil these goals. According to Khaslavsky and Shedroff, Juicy Salif provokes a desire not only to possess the object, but also the values that helped create it, including innovation, sophistication, elegance and originality. To the user, it speaks as much about the designer as about themselves. Starck carries his authorship weight in a similar way to that of artists: the designer of this piece is seen to create, use influences, conceptualise, problematise and problem solve, express, and all this, is embodied in Juicy Salif. (7) It leads the user to discover something deeper about the experience of juicing lemons. (8) Its promise gets renovated every time the object is used or looked at.

Baudrillard, I suspect, would challenge Khaslavsky and Shedroff’s attempt at systematizing seduction. These 8 seductive characteristics mainly describe the reception of seduction from the point of view of the seducee. The seductive experience they refer to, is that of the desiring subject, whose attention is diverted, has emotions, values, goals and squeezes lemons. The seducer object and its destiny, together with the relational aspects of the absent object and the disappearing subject (Butler, 2005) have not been addressed.

As a lemon squeezer, Juicy Salif deceives, turns away from truth and meaning. This is led by the object’s appearance, by the way it manifests itself. Its ambiguity has contributed to its successful sales at an average rate of 50,000 units per year since its launch in 1990 (Lloyd and Snelders, 2003: 238). The identification of its main function as a conversation starter (Norman, 2004: 112, Morgan, 1999: 9) or ’social lubricant’ (Lloyd and Snelders, 2003: 251) has influenced, in turn, its acquisition of artistic status. Starck’s designs have been ‘—literally and figuratively— placed on pedestals’ (Whitely, 1994: 131) in shop displays (Julier, 2000: 70-71), design museums and, more importantly, art galleries and museums (Sala Rekalde, Spain, 1997; Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA, 1998; Marble Palace at the State Russian Museum; Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2002; Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; Centre Pompidou, 2003).

Manolo Blahnik’s 2003 exhibition at the Design Museum also emphasises this reversibility of positions between functional and contemplative objects. The display was highly theatrical, elaborating on potential narratives, maximising the impact of the shoes’ appearance. Each room represented one, often contradictory, aspect of the shoes: their cultural significance, their technical innovation, their architectural qualities, their ethnological value… The precious shoes, however, were out of reach and there was an air of hysteria about the gallery. Constant little cries were being uttered in what is normally a quiet space… As a female viewer, I can say it was a deeply unsatisfying show; but for that reason, a successful one, a show that left begging one for more because it revealed an ‘ironic reverie on the principle of functionality’ (1991: 64).

Manolo Blahnik exhibition, Design Museum. Exhibition images courtesy of D&AD

These last words were the ones chosen by Baudrillard to characterize Surrealist works. He also said that Surrealists ’seek out the wrong or reverse side of things, and undermine the world’s apparent factuality’ (1991: 64). This is particularly relevant when referring to Meret Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Furs and Man Ray’s Cadeau. With deceptively simple strategies, both objects exist to unsettle the viewer, to challenge her to feel or think things that are only acceptable, and perhaps possible, in certain realms guided by specific conventions (like the gallery space or the analytic room, as mentioned earlier).

Right: Meret Oppenheim, Breakfast in furs.Left: May Ray, Le Cadeau

Baudrillard’s statement could, however, be applied to most works of art. Naia del Castillo’s works Corral and Seducer’s Shirt explore relational aspects between viewer and work. One can only get close to them through her photographic images, as the shirt is exhibited without the body and the lipstick is behind glass. Victoria Civera’s Bitter Dream, is made of tactile, familiar but obscenely red plastic handles and piercingly long sewing pins. Both contemporary works challenge common objects, overturning and transposing them, using reversible strategies, seeking out angles unseen or invisible before. Again, we come face to face with this two-sided quality: common and strange, familiar and unknown…

Right: Naia del Castillo, Corral. Middle: Naia del Castillo,Camisa de seductor. Left: Victoria Civera, Sueño amargo

For Baudrillard, art was a mode of seduction, a ‘lever of disappearance’ (Baudrillard, 1988: 71); now, art forms are ‘playing the game at the level of simulation’ (Baudrillard, 1987: 53-54). Some contemporary artworks, I would argue, still posit a challenge to the reality principle and, as seducers, belong to the category of art that was. The study of these works can also be useful in my task to bring Baudrillard and psychoanalysis’ positions closer. Jacques Lacan’s most significant contribution to psychoanalysis is, possibly, his concept of Objet Petit a. Like the term seduction, Objet Petit a resists systematization (Fink 1995: 83). It is an unspecularizable object, an object that defies symbolization and, therefore, language, as voice or gaze do; it is the object cause of desire (Lacan, 1986). Lacan later placed Objet Petit a within Marxist theory, as surplus jouissance, a loss for the alienated subject. Zizek equates Objet Petit a to Hitchcock’s MacGuffin (Zizek, 1991: 181-182), something that drives the plot of the film but is in itself completely indifferent to it, like the name of the made-up secret agent George Kaplan with whom Cary Grant’s character is mistaken in North by Northwest (1959). Whatever manifestation we choose, Lacan’s Objet Petit a is a void, a void that corresponds to Baudrillard’s absence of truth, which he refers to in Seduction (1991: 56). Objet Petit a can never be obtained because it has never been there in the first place. However, we circle around it, inevitably.

Let me give an example. Using the theft of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre, carried out by Vincenzo Peruggia on 21 August 1911 and the subsequent queues to look at the empty space left by the painting, Darian Leader explores the nature of art, desire and visual seduction. In his book Stealing the Mona Lisa, what art stops us from seeing, he puts forward the theory that, rather than humans being image-capturing devices, it is in fact the other way round: images are human capturing devices, especially in their absence (Leader, 2002: 17-25). People seeing the empty space of the Mona Lisa did not queue for the actual painting. Leader plays with the idea of desiring objects, of objects embodying the enigmatic and malevolent dimension of the look of the Other. Luring and deceiving are intrinsic to the image. But this is something Baudrillard already tells us (see his chapter on the trompe l’oeil in Seduction, 1991).

The relationship between seduction and desire is one Baudrillard contests and psychoanalysis rejects —as is evidenced by studies examining Freud’s renunciation of the ‘Seduction theory’ (Forrester, 1990: 62-89, Roazen, 2002: 1-14), a theory termed by Baudrillard as the ‘lost object of psychoanalysis’ (Baudrillard, 1991: 55). In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard stated that ‘only the subject desires, only the object seduces’ (1999: 111). Desire and seduction seem to relate to each other as if part of a moebius strip, a topological surface with one single side and only one boundary component. As the two sides are continuous, a cross over, from inside to outside and back is possible. Seduction and desire are not discrete terms, but continuous with each other. However, when one passes a finger round the surface of the moebius strip, it is impossible to say at which precise point the crossing has taken place. Seduction (in and through the Objet Petit a) seduces desire and then moves on. In Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst, a theory too complex to go into today, the analyst herself is represented by Objet Petit a, becoming the object cause of desire in this dual situation. The relationship between a desiring subject and a seductive object is of special relevance to the aims of my research, as its exchanges and its processes offer a model for the exploration of seductive practices, drawing on its relational, mechanistic and subjective aspects.

I would now like to bring together some of the concepts I have explored so far and that may seem to be disconnected from each other. Following on from the relationship between art and analysis I have been shaping, I want to outline here a proposition, key to my current thinking: the work of art as a manifestation of Objet Petit a and therefore occupying, in the gallery space, the position the analyst occupies in the analysis room. The analogy I have chosen is one of the many that could be derived from problematising and relating two threefold interactions (Dachy 2000): Art, with the artist, the work, the viewer; and Psychoanalysis, with the analyst, the speech and the analysand. As any analogy, it may throw numerous things in common, but numerous assumptions and differences as well; my thesis will hopefully address both.

The study of the mechanics of ‘artwork as analyst’ is not a new idea. In fact, Jacques Lacan already outlined it in his seminars (especially VI, XI, XVII and XXI), and hinted at it in his Discourse of the Analyst. It has since then been worked through by Parveen Adams, in her contextualisation of Mary Kelly’s Interim show (1991). It has been considered by Robert Samuels, in his examination of Lacan’s interest in art, especially Aragon’s poetry and Holbein’s Ambassadors (1995). More recently, it has been displayed in the art exhibitions held at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, the talks accompanying them and the subsequent journal publication (Kivland & Du Ry, 2000). However, in my study, I will advance the proposition that the place the analyst and the artwork occupy, that of representing Objet Petit a, is, within a relational context, the place of the seducer.

Mary Kelly, Corpus

It is in the context of the last proposition that engaging with Baudrillard’s thought proved of the outmost importance. First, his critique of psychoanalysis has helped me to be aware of a common mistake in this field, namely that of taking the assumptions underlying the theory and practice of psychoanalysis for granted, of not being able to take an overview and be critical about its paradigms and the pitfalls my approach may have. Secondly, the focus on the appearances rather than the meaning of objects has allowed me to identify and formulate a methodological position, based on established skills and techniques for engaging with the visual field and the object world, and experimental methods of study based on my art practice, brought to bear on an interdisciplinary project. A practice-led approach is, in this case, the best way to examine my specific research questions. Thirdly, and more importantly, Baudrillard has provided me with a valuable cautionary word, something intrinsic to seduction but easily forgotten when doing a PhD: as Alan Cholodenko, pointed out to me, Baudrillard warns us that seduction will seduce everything, including my attempts to study it. Cunningly, fiercely in its challenging nature, it will resist efforts at systematization whatever the approach I decide to take. Seduction is eternal and its mastery, impossible (Baudrillard, 1988: 74). One of the consequences of this is my current focus on seductive practices and their processes, rather than on the phenomenon itself, as I have discussed in this paper. Seductive practices call seduction into play instead of identifying it and naming it. Through summoning seduction, these practices redefine our relationship to it, as perhaps seducers, seducees or observers of a seductive process.

Laura González, M/F, Heart, Strange animal

In conclusion, in order to study the seductive characteristics of certain artefacts, the friction between Baudrillard’s theory of seduction and psychoanalysis’ approach to it could be worked through by thinking of both art and psychoanalysis as practices. Thus, a strategy enabling the artwork to become the object cause of desire in the gallery space can begin to emerge.

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