(W)hole
For a long time on an outside wall of the Walker art museum in Minneapolis hung a “sculpture” by the artist Lawrence Wiener in which large aluminum letters spelled out the statement: “BITS & PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE.” The word “whole” was hung some five feet off the sidewalk so that one could grasp the floating W in one’s hands and this prompted me to plan an art heist—that I talked about but never did—in which I would remove the W so that the statement would now conclude “SEMBLANCE OF A HOLE.”
I’ve been noticing that a certain kind of religious person idealizes wholeness, fullness and plenitude, the oceanic feeling and everything sublime, while another kind of person, who may or may not be religious, celebrates, on the contrary, the peculiar qualities of the void; lack, emptiness, depravity and alienation. Alienation, for some, is even a kind of virtue; as exemplified by the Zizek fanboy slogan Let’s get alienated!
For someone who has worked in the trades and has witnessed the alienation of my labor first-hand—where I become a zombie, lose my identity in the course of a work day, become a commodity in the production of capital, and so on—I am less convinced by the virtues of alienation. Or should this alienation goad me to revolt? Thinky face emoji.
The rise of alienation in psychoanalysis is attached to an old philosophical program and makes up the better part of the vibes that shiver through the Lacano-Hegelian vectors of critical theory. The gymnastic movement of the dialectic takes place, high-wire style, on the rim of the void. This is not without its moments of virtuosic cultural insight, together with a terrific litany of jokes, but I remain unconvinced as to its validity, particularly in relation to psychoanalysis; as I have asked before on this channel: why must the analyst decide in advance how a person is supposed to be?
What the dialectical insistence upon lack seems to miss is that, *clears throat* dialectically speaking, whole is nested inside of hole and vice versa, that sufficiency is implied by insufficiency, and that identity is implied by alienation. So that when one hits the alienation bell enough times, as if it were the fundamental truth of the world, it begins to sound like repression. This is the rule of negation that Freud points out as a way of listening; if the patient is insistent upon some point, chances are they also motivated by its reversal.
This makes me think of a grocery store called “Hole Foods.”
That hole is written inside whole is a nice clue of the mnemic residue left over from the shear intensities of childhood; what you can and cannot recall; a plenitude that is also a void... This is like the Ein Sof, god of the Kabbalists: an unthinkable void from out of which all creation emanates.
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, 1991, Lawrence Wiener
