0 évaluation0% ont trouvé ce document utile (0 vote)
37 vues1 page
This document discusses two mechanisms - condensation and displacement - that account for the strange, puzzle-like quality of images in surrealist works like dreams. Condensation involves omitting some thoughts but representing others that are "over-determined" by combining features of multiple individuals or objects. Displacement seeks to avoid censorship by translating one thing into another, like using clothing to represent the individual wearing it. These mechanisms allow unconscious thoughts to emerge disguised within conscious thought processes. The document argues that surrealist automatism, by stimulating enigmatic images, aims to invoke these same unconscious "thing-presentations" in a successful way.
This document discusses two mechanisms - condensation and displacement - that account for the strange, puzzle-like quality of images in surrealist works like dreams. Condensation involves omitting some thoughts but representing others that are "over-determined" by combining features of multiple individuals or objects. Displacement seeks to avoid censorship by translating one thing into another, like using clothing to represent the individual wearing it. These mechanisms allow unconscious thoughts to emerge disguised within conscious thought processes. The document argues that surrealist automatism, by stimulating enigmatic images, aims to invoke these same unconscious "thing-presentations" in a successful way.
This document discusses two mechanisms - condensation and displacement - that account for the strange, puzzle-like quality of images in surrealist works like dreams. Condensation involves omitting some thoughts but representing others that are "over-determined" by combining features of multiple individuals or objects. Displacement seeks to avoid censorship by translating one thing into another, like using clothing to represent the individual wearing it. These mechanisms allow unconscious thoughts to emerge disguised within conscious thought processes. The document argues that surrealist automatism, by stimulating enigmatic images, aims to invoke these same unconscious "thing-presentations" in a successful way.
71 1he automatic image In the process ot condensation dream-thoughts, in varying degrees, are omitted and the ones that remain represented in the condensation are lett because they are over-determined by their content. An over- determined image is organized by several determinant tactors, tor example, the image ot a man condenses, combining teatures ot several individuals. 3I 1he second mechanism ot displacement, or veering on, seeks to avoid censorship by translating one thing into another. lor example, clothing might be the displaced (metonymic, sign tor an individual associated vith it. 32
It is these mechanisms, condensation and displacement vhich account tor the strangeness, the rebus puzzle-like quality ot dream-images in surrealism, like Bretons man cut in tvo by a vindov. 1hrough condensation and displacement, an unconscious thought emerges disguised vithin the preconscious-consciousness system. lreuds +,+ essay on 1he Lnconscious shovs the compatibility ot surrealism vith, at least, his theoretical viev ot the production ot thought processes close to the unconscious: In the last tev pages ot The Interpretation of Dreams, vhich vas published in +,oo, the viev vas developed that thought-processes, i.e. those acts ot cathexis vhich are comparatively remote trom perception, are in themselves vithout quality and unconscious, and that they attain their capacity to become conscious only through being linked vith the residues ot perceptions ot words. But vord-presentations, tor their part too, are derived trom sense-perceptions, in the same vay as thing-presentations are, the question might theretore be raised vhy presentations ot objects cannot become conscious through the medium ot their ovn perceptual residues being linked vith vord-presentations is not yet the same thing as becoming conscious, but only makes it possible to become so 33 1hus, properly speaking, the psychic automatism claimed by the surrealists (the stimulation ot an enigmatic image, is a means to invoke unconscious ideational representatives, thing-presentations vith a successtul image, as Breton puts it in the Manifesto, vhere its obscurity does not betray it. 34 + lreuds example is the condensation ot his Lncle oset and his triend P. See Chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams. : I am draving here on Llla l. Sharpes account ot dreams in her Dream Analysis (Iondon: Hogarth Press, +,;,, p. :. She dravs the analogy betveen tgures ot rhetorical speech and the mechanisms ot the dream- vork long betore acques Iacan. Sigmund lreud, 1he Lnconscious, On Metapsychology, PlI ++, pp. :o;:. Breton, Manifesto of Surreal- ism, p. ;.
A LM Still (Photograph) From Man Ray's Cinépoéme' As A Photograph in La Centre of André Breton's Essay, Le Surréalisme Et La Peinture' in La Révolution Surréaliste, No. - , October