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Home , Leonardo da Vinci

ANAMORPHOSIS, THE IMAGINARY, ALCHEMY

When Leonardo advised students to spend time gazing at stains on walls, in order to find scenes, portraits, landscapes, etc. hidden in their blurs and smudges, he was giving away a key secret about stochastic resonance, the subject’s relation to the other, and the imaginary.1 Leonardo, the hero of representational art, was thus in many ways a proto-Surrealist, anticipating the modern Surrealists’ (and ‘Pataphysicians’) flirtations with chance and the unconscious. Even more curiously, however, he was a proto-Lacanian, giving out valuable advice about the imaginary and its alliances. For Lacan, the imaginary was one of the three domains of the psyche (imaginary, symbolic, Real), linked in mutual interdependence so that, like the Borromeo , the bond between any two was also the inclusion of the third. Lacan, it could be said, began his impressive antinomian career with the imaginary, in the form of the “ stage,” the point in a young child’s development when it recognizes itself in the mirror. This recognition is complex, involving a forward temporal projection to a moment of mastery that the subject has not yet reached, embodied in the good-looking reflection; and a backwards retro- active awareness of the subject’s previous and present state as a “body in pieces,” a “metonymic” being lacking the metaphoric wholeness of its reflected double.

Lacan realized the reciprocal economy connecting this forward and backward temporality, as well as the topology of triangulation that allowed the subject to “enter the other” in order to enter language and the “network of symbolic relationships” that linked the imaginary to the symbolic. The third element necessitated by the contract between imagination and the symbolic was, of course, the Real, marked by the partial or part-object (feces, breast, phallus, gaze, voice) and its of crisscross “sutures” that embedded each into the central void of the other.

It has been an obsession for most art historians to speculate on mysteries raised about Leonardo’s ambiguous biography, his reputed homosexuality, as a self-portrait, etc. Leonardo was in many ways an ideal “body in pieces,” realizing his idealized image through the Other of art. His popular were the model of his own subjectivity, ingenious gadgets for conquering the mute brutality of air, earth, fire, and water mirroring his own deployment of the imaginary. What the quote brings forward, however, is Leonardo’s awareness and high regard for the speculative (in the fundamentally optical sense) in its guise as theatrical impresario pulling out dramatic characters, turbulent confrontations, monsters, and landscape scenes. In a Lacanian way, Leonardo pulls forth these images from the depths of inanimate waste. He calls out, summons life from the dead, formless stains. He advocates in the service of “” (the image trapped within the image) and thus connects the primal geometry of the uncanny (life-in- /death-in-life), as imaginary, with the voice that evokes form from the formless, a voice that employs a password, a magic spell, which one would imagine in Harry Potter-ese to be “Levitate!” What is called forth was lying hidden (L. latebat) “all along.”

The body in pieces, just lying there all along, both an animistic and mortuarial vision! One thinks of the of the Day of Resurrection, showing corpses breaking out of their graves, gradually reassembling their full “astral” selves in preparation for their appearance before Judgment (illustration: Luca Signorelli, Resurrection of the Flesh (detail), 1499-1502, , Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto). This in-between is the classic “between the two ” of Lacanian lore, documented through the Blblical-painterly accounts of the walk of the dead to the house of Resurrection, in the reverse direction, as if to an origin. Out of the formless of dust and ashes, the body in pieces re-forms and reforms itself, en marche, towards the point of judgment, always a point because always a point of view, singular and, within the Cartesian coordinates, unlocatable.

Anamorphosis, the Imaginary, Alchemy 1 This point is, as the teachings say, a fulcrum. Related to the anamorph’s one single angle of view, captured in the Holbein portrait as an angle relating the skull of Golgotha to the resurrection of Golgotha through a 27º angle (3x3x3, a “recursive number” in the form of 3.333…) set for April 11, 1533, also filled with threes and another recursive number, 11 (11.1111…) — recursive because “from nothing to nothing” reveals the art of double negation that brings forth everything from nothing, to which everything returns. The nothing of the stain (La Mancha, the famed plain across which Don Quixote wandered in search, like Diogenes, of truth). The unlocatability of the single point of view designated by the anamorphic image creates the shadow of the quest, appropriately “meaningless” and, hence, orthogonal to any interest/intentionality, “open to what happens.”

Leonardo calls forth, levitates, this happening, making all substance potentially performative in the presence of that particular brand of alchemy related to the animation of dead things. This skill, practiced at tomb-sites where three x’s call up the fundamentally disinterested soul of the deceased to say what might happen, was also a call employing a particular voice, a voix acousmatique that, going beyond the phonemic functions of language, short-circuited the speaker to the addressee by means of a password function, a construction of Lacanian mi-dire, or half-speech, like that used by paranoiacs, related to the showtime ventriloquist-with-dummy act. Indeed, the “dummy” in French is le mort, the dead man. Lacan was interested in this not just for its associations with death but, rather, with the card game of bridge, where the dead man, the hand displayed by the “declarer,” is central in its relation to the strategy of bids. This alternative function of showing and tricking — the kind of close-up magic where the illusion takes place entirely in the head of the viewer — is a logic of showing everything and still being able to conceal the twist or trick that maintains the order of the imaginary. Just as the mirror in the Lacanian mirror stage “shows everything” — for the first time in the child’s young life — the everything is nonetheless saturated by shadows of the symbolic relationships that sustain it and the Real it forbids by dividing space by the silvered glass surface.

The Real involves finding the spot that anamorphosis implicates, the exception excluded/included by the system, at the place where one might expect: dead center. This is the final framing, the inside frame, the position from which inversion wields its most potent weaponry. This anamorphy, which we symbolize by the Greek letter Omega, ω, is “that which has a middle,” or rather a “center,” from which all mediations of the “twinned” components (use/value, life/death, appearance/reality, representation/artifact, etc.) are exchanged. Like the silent term of the rhetorical enthymeme, the center of anamorphosis is a void, a negation, a surplus or lack. It doesn’t fit anywhere, and this locational dysfunctionality transfers to the whole range of phenomena (mostly partial objects) that fall under its heading. For example the “acousmatic voice” is the voice that comes from an unknown place. The gaze comes towards the subject from a void, a blank location. The phallus is not a place but, in the form of the “herm,” a marker of a void between spaces. Shit is precisely a sign because it comes from inside the body — where even there it has an complex role as “other” — and acquires its volatile significance simply be being outside. A body with shit in it is the same “inverse condition” as a room with shit on the floor, but the polarities have been reversed. The “logic” is that of the Jentschian uncanny, AD→DA (reciprocal inverse suture). In Hegelian terms, by “cancelling” shit within the body (keeping it out of the peritoneum and other body cavities, the body can be both “full of shit” and not harmed at the same time, but when shit is outside the body, the poles reverse it is the inside of the body that is represented by the shit, and the volatile questions is “Whose shit IS THIS?” In other words, the shit outside represents the innermost of the donor, an obscene central motive or wish that “should have remained concealed,” the condition that defines the essence of the uncanny. It is important to note that this uncanny disrupts the networks of symbolic relations, that it is not just a perceptual experience which we can assign to the imaginary but it is the imaginary itself, i.e. the inner by which the topology of space and time ends up as a staged perceptual event, such as the allegory of the Cave in Plato, the formal geometry of the classic theater or cinema space, or the conditions of digital graphics.

Anamorphosis, the Imaginary, Alchemy 2 By being a non-located in-between, a permanently liminal space, the inside frame is a permanent “Other .” It produces Other-ness out of, literally, nothing. In the Lacanian scheme of linked “rings” of imaginary, symbolic, and Real, it is clear what this in-between is in between: the symbolic, with its commitments to the system of signifiers, and the Real, with its resistance to the same. The imaginary is this link, but Lacan would be quick to add that the link requires the double-gated mirror, which reflects “in both directions,” the split in the world that continues from the mirror stage onward to separate the mirror’s virtual promises of wholeness and mastery from the subject in pieces, the material body without organs that retains its ties to nothingness.

It is not so idiotic then to compare the economy of shit, with its own deployment of the uncanny’s reversed polarities, to the practices of necromancy, finding out “what the dead have to say.” The imaginary is directly represented, even in Hegel, with the idea of a gallery that unfolds in a set of instructive images as the initiate descends into the cave, just as actual initiates did in the Magdalenian cultures of southern France. In other words, follow Leonardo’s “Lacanian” advice.

Note: 1. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on , trans. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005). “I will not forget to insert into these rules, a new theoretical for knowledge’s sake, which, although it seems of little import and good for a laugh, is nonetheless, of great utility in bringing out the in some of these inventions. This is the case if you cast your glance on any walls dirty with such stains or walls made up of rock formations of different types. If you have to invent some scenes, you will be able to discover them there in diverse forms, in diverse landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, extensive plains, valleys, and hills. You can even see different battle scenes and movements made up of unusual figures, faces with strange expressions, and myriad things which you can transform into a complete and proper form constituting part of similar walls and rocks. These are like the sound of bells, in whose tolling, you hear names and words that your imagination conjures up. Don’t underestimate this idea of mine, which calls to mind that it would not be too much of an effort to pause sometimes to look into these stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places. If these are well contemplated, you will find fantastic inventions that awaken the of the painter to new inventions, such as compositions of battles, animals, and men, as well as diverse composition of landscapes, and monstrous things, as devils and the like. These will do you well because they will awaken genius with this jumble of things. But, first you must know the components of all those groups of things you wish to represent, such as the members of the animal kingdom, as well as the components of the countryside, such as rocks, plants and similar things ….”

Anamorphosis, the Imaginary, Alchemy 3