word has transformed, from the Latin abjectus, meaning to throw away to the French

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1 Abject This essay is a study of the word abject. I am interested in the ways in which this word has transformed, from the Latin abjectus, meaning to throw away to the French scholar Julia Kristeva s definition found in her 1980 essay, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. My goal in tracing the uses of the word abject is to form an argument for its currency in visual culture, namely graphic design. As I will prove, mainly from the depth of Kristeva s definition, the issue of self and Other requires a critical engagement, one that permeates graphic design, but is rarely discussed. Therefore, the first logical step would be to understand the origin of the word abject. Origin and meaning of abject The prefix ab-, from Latin is translated as from, away, off, down, the combining form of ject, is also of Latin origin and is translated to mean to throw. 1 The origin of the word abject comes from the both the Latin abjectus and abjicere, where ab + jicere means to throw. The oldest English definition of the word abject is found in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and reports that it was first used in 1475, both literally and figuratively as a verb to mean to cast off. In 1520 the definition seemed to change slightly to cast down, brought low in condition, low-lying. It again changed between 1534 and 1548 to take on a meaning directed more at an individual, such as in low in regard, mean-spirited, despicable and that which is cast-off, refuse. In the 1600s it changes again slightly to mean to degrade, reject. During Henry the VI s reign the 1 Funk & Wagnalls New International Dictionary of the English Language. (Chicago: World Publishers INC, 1996) abject 1

2 word is used to describe servants and transforms into the words abjectly an adverb and abjectness. In 1653 abjection is introduced to the etymology of abject to mean the action of casting down, or the condition of one cast down, degradation, low estate, or the action of casting off; rejection (1655). 2 The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology has traced abject to Wycliffe s The Lantern of Light, which uses Middle English abject to mean outcast, wretched. 3 Bryan Garner in Garner s Modern American Usage gives more detail to how the word is used: abjection; abjectness. Both words refer to a state of being cast aside, abased, and humiliated. The subtle difference between the two is that abjection refers to the physical condition e.g.: Abjection was a way of surviving Stalin: you gave him something of your blood, without wavering. Other Comments, Forbes, 3 Feb. 2003, at 26. Abjectness refers to the state of mind e.g.: But were he to continue in office, at least by judging by the abjectness of his apology, MADD might just have found a national poster boy. Jim Coyle, We ve Come a Long Way in Public Attitudes, Toronto Star, 14 Jan. 2003, at B2. As it happens, these words occur about equally often. 4 Before Kristeva The term abjection has long been used in religious texts to define that which is excluded or taboo from a specific religion. In Judaism there has always been the taboo of eating certain foods, but it was not until the Christian religion used the word abject that it was used to specify wrongdoing, the Other, or sin. 5 Therefore, the word abject in a religious context is concerned with a specific object or sin that must be present in order to become abjected from pious practice. 2 William Little, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) abject 3 Robert K. Barnhart, ed. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology. (The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.) abject 4 Bryan A. Garner, Garner s Modern American Usage. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) abject 5 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) This is from Julia Kristeva s Powers of Horror essay 243 2

3 For the psychoanalyst the abjected Other is not an object, as in religious practice, but that which is rejected from consciousness. Freud has used abject to refer to the unconscious feelings that are rejected by the conscious being. If a cross-over of conscious/unconscious were to occur a relapse could take place in the form of psychosis. In the psychoanalyst s definition the unconscious is the Other and if rejected a boundary is formed in which the I/Other, Inside/Outside is in struggle 6 David Houston Jones adds to this, Lacan referred to the term l abjection and la forclusion to describe the violent expulsion of a content from both the conscious and unconscious, a desperate purge which he posited as a cause of psychosis. 7 Along with the psychoanalyst s use of the word abject, Surrealist Georges Bataille was known to use it in many of his writings. As Maryline Lukacher writes, Bataille, is interpreted by Kristeva to have meant, that the plane of abjection is that of the subject/object relationship (and not subject/other subject) and that this archaism is rooted in anal eroticism rather than sadism, she (Kristeva) is also suggesting that such an archaic relationship to the object interprets the relationship to the mother. 8 The main difference between Bataille s usage of abject and Kristeva s is that Bataille was referring to a specific object. As we will see in Kristeva s definition the Other is elusive, made up of a mixture of emotions, words and thoughts, etc. 6 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) Julia Kristeva mentions the mentally ill who are on the borderline where the unconscious is seen slipping into their speech and bodily functions David Houston Jones, The Body Abject. (Oxford: Lang, 2000) 13 8 Maryline Lukacher, Maternal Fictions. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 3

4 Julia Kristeva and the abject Kristeva s definition of abject is probably the most widely used by scholars and artists today. Kristeva, a celebrated French scholar, introduced a new definition of abject in her Pouvoirs de l horreur: essai sur l abjection, in Translated into English as Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, she diagnoses Louis-Ferdinand Celine s writings as a struggle with an abject maternal body that both fascinates and horrifies. 9 This quote is better understood in the context of the maternal body being the ultimate and first experience of the semiotic element. 10 Kristeva writes, The semiotic rhythms, tones, and movements that make their way into signification are expressions of the return of that repressed primary bond. 11 From the beginning she defines abject as neither subject nor object. She sees the abject as the Other that is close by but not attainable, hardly definable, and something that has no form: When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. 12 Kristeva describes the abject as the place where meaning collapses, Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A something that I do not recognize as a thing. Kristeva defines the abject in a non-definition, one that is there but she cannot display in words. 9 Michael Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Vol. 3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Michael Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Vol. 3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 76, To better understand Kristeva we must define the semiotic and symbolic elements of signification. The semiotic element is the discharge of bodily drives through rhythms, tones, colors and movement in signification. The Symbolic element of signification basically puts the semiotic into a representational form so that signification does not give way to delirium or psychotic babble. Different forms of signification display different forms of semiotic and symbolic elements. Math or logic would be an example of signification in which the symbolic element is dominant, whereas art or music could be a form of signification where the semiotic element is dominant. The tension between semiotic and symbolic is what produces signification. 11 Michael Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics Vol. 3. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 230 4

5 Kelly Oliver in regarding Kristeva s definition of abjection writes, The abject challenges borders; so in the process of becoming a self or individual, the infant rejects that which challenges borders in order to set up its own. 13 In this interpretation it becomes clear that the abject remains in a place that cannot be rationalized or compartmentalized but can only be found when the rational boundaries are blurred and the properness of everyday life is no longer discernable. In her interpretation of Kristeva, Oliver continues, So, anything that challenges borders, the in-between, must be eliminated, abjected, to become properly identified as an individual. 14 Another significant definition/non-definition of the word abject is the improper/unclean. Kristeva in this description uses actual objects, food loathing, and filth, waste, or dung as examples of objects that set off the body into an abjective state, one that causes Kristeva to want to abject her own body in order to integrate herself with the unclean refuse that is the Other. In this scenario the vomiting and spasms of the body protect her from the reality of this integration actually happening. The corpse, outside of religion and science creates for Kristeva one of the most abject moments: No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. 15 When confronted with the abject, death, the Other, a border is presented. This border separates two seemingly opposite things: life/death, clean/unclean, and the crossing over or rejection of one to the Other is what Kristeva explains as the abject moment. This idea 13 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity without Subjects. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998) Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 231 5

6 of a border or separation is one of the most fascinating aspects of Kristeva s definition of abject. She places this thought in such contexts as death infecting life, which brings up thoughts of threat, that there is one accepted idea or path and the Other threatens to disrupt this, make it unclean, or irrational if it is normally thought to be rational. As an example Kristeva describes the abject feelings brought about by an exhibit of the Holocaust: In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children s shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among Other things. 16 Kristeva sees the Nazi crime as abject because it disrupts how childhood and science have rationally been viewed. The Nazis construed science as a mask for hideous torture, therefore skewing the rational definition that we have come to know of science giving life. In other words, science abjects itself to the Other, and this time within the realm of death instead of life. The image of children s shoes underneath a Christmas tree in comparison to a heap of orphan shoes at a Nazi death camp presents a similar abjective moment. The meaning of the Christmas tree image is abjected and replaced by the opposite, that which again does not define life. What we see happening here is Kristeva s moment of abjection causes a mistaken identity. As we will see in the following feminist texts the idea of mistaken identity is taken up, intentionally or unintentionally, as a powerful tool of abjection. 16 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 232 6

7 Feminist texts and abject In Skeptical Feminism Carolyn Dever explores the feminist popular fiction from the 1970s and 80s in an attempt to present their place in feminist theory. The term abject, from Kristeva, is used to describe the degradation of female bodily functions of the characters in these novels as they interact in misogynist establishments. As an example there is a character named Kyla who has a nightmare about having a menstrual discharge in front of a patriarchal board of examiners in an academic setting. Of this incident Dever writes, In a startling moment of unconscious identification, Kyla aligns herself, and her fears for and about herself, with the misogynist establishment: she, like her examiners, fears the uncontainable bloody excesses of the female body, and such a fear of bodily betrayal is at once embarrassing and professionally disabling. 17 In this passage Dever portrays Kyla s bodily discharge as an abject circumstance that is both embarrassing and empowering in the patriarchal academic setting. This is an interesting dichotomy since Hal Foster in his essay, Obscene, Abject, Traumatic has posed the question, Is abjection a refusal of power or its reinvention in a strange new guise, or is it somehow both these events at once? 18 As Dever suggests, Bodily humiliation signifies the risks feminists take and accounts for the psychological costs of patriarchy as it is experienced by subjects trapped within a female body. Social systems, continues Dever, reason from the body outward, as these realist texts suggest. And in their expose of the arbitrary nature of the violence that ensues, they map and mobilize modes of resistance, not as claims to clitoral power do by reinterpreting the female body s meaning and thus the terms of the heterosexual contract, but by presenting models of female resourcefulness, resilience, and community that short-circuit the totalitarian regimes of patriarchy. 17 Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism. (Minneapolis: Universiy of Minnesota Press, 2004) Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism. (Minneapolis: Universiy of Minnesota Press, 2004) 255 7

8 Dever quotes Julia Kristeva, Menstrual blood stands for the danger issuing from within identity (social or sexual); it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference. The abject circumstance in Kyla s case symbolizes the struggle for women to break through the boundary separating maternity and the patriarchal professional environment. In this particular instance, as Foster suggests, Kyla s accident could be thought to create a difference, where the power of the examiners cannot reach, and possibly Kyla s abjected body becomes a new form of power. 19 Abjection and the transference of power is seen even more prevalently in Christine Sylvester s book Feminist International Relations. Sylvester s book, represents a volume of feminist essays accompanied by Sylvester s analyzation of various important aspects. My interest lies in one particular essay titled, Handmaids tales of Washington power: the abject and the real Kennedy White House. Sylvester explains that, a handmaid is what radical feminists used to call a breeder, but with a twist: she is forced by society leaders to limit her life to themes of childbearing. Handmaids must wear billowing red garments that simultaneously signal their status as potentially fertile females, hide those bodies from public view, and restrain the sight and movement of the wearers. 20 Within the discussion of this essay Sylvester notes that the use of the term abject in the title and throughout the essay is derived from the same meaning as Kristeva intended in her Powers of Horror essay. In the context of this vile position of Atwood s 19 Carolyn Dever, Skeptical Feminism. (Minneapolis: Universiy of Minnesota Press, 2004) Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 53 8

9 handmaid we find the term abject used to describe the handmaid s powered position of slave but also contaminator of the system. Sylvester explains, Handmaids ooze power with, around, or over those they loyally attend. They do so through their decisional capacities as recorders and machine operators, fetchers of reports, and deciders of where to seat whom or what to shred from the main story. The position that Atwood sets her handmaids up in offers a unique position of abjecting from the masculine norms that have been understood in Washington. As Kristeva mentions in her Powers of Horror essay the abject can also be defined as a criminal whom attempts to disrupt the law-abiding system, as in a shameless rapist or a killer without conscions. To give a description of this position in terms of the handmaid Sylvester writes, It also glimpses the way that power from abjection can disturb identity, system, order, can not respect borders, positions, rules, can be in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. In Atwood s fictional setting it is not only the position of the handmaid that can be considered abject but also the dress they wear. Sylvester describes the dresses of red, symbolizing the menstrual blood of a childbearing woman she states, One seepage that threatens the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference is menstrual blood. This excrement is usually kept out of view and memory in power places in Washington; but Atwood s fictional handmaids help us find it at the center of power concerns. The idea of this subcultural group of handmaids viewed only as machines for producing children and cast outside of the power structure presents a fascinating scenario for a realization of abject power, used to upset, disturb, and disrupt the dominant structure. 9

10 Visual art and the abject From these feminists text we witness numerous descriptions of the body as visually abject; that which is able to disrupt the social structure that has been so neatly put in place. Visual artists, like the feminist authors, have taken note of Kristeva s abject and used it as an intellectual platform for their work. For artists there is a great deal that can be taken from this definition, especially in defining the visual context of the Other, as Kristeva writes, the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless primacy constituted by primal repression. 21 The artist must delve into the repressed, the unspeakable, taboo nature of our culture and construct the meaning that has been lost and overlooked. In Western culture there are many rational positions that pose as the proper way, the norm, what has been proven; as artists, graphic designers, and writers alike, there is a need to search out the Other; that which has been tossed out by our culture, abjected because it did not fit into a proper category. Artists must discover and reconstruct what has been abjected in order to challenge customary practice, defeat stereotypes that disallow multiple faces of a solution. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s many artists began to use Kristeva s definition of the abject as a basis for their art. In 1993 the Whitney Museum, New York, staged an exhibition titled Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which gave the term a wider currency in art. Photographer Cindy Sherman is seen as a key contributor to the 21 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)

11 abject in art, as well as many others including Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick, Paul McCarthy, Gilbert and George, Robert Gober, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith and Jake and Dinos Chapman. 22 But the question must be raised, how does one go about constructing the abject in the realm of the visual? Based on Kristeva s definition it would seem that there is no true object. In searching for means of the visual construction of abjection we can look at the writing of Hal Foster. In a chapter titled Obscene, Abject, Traumatic Foster deals with the shift to the real in contemporary visual culture. In mapping this shift he looks at the Lacanian definition of the gaze. 23 In Lacanian terms the gaze is a threat to the subject where the viewer is gazing at the subject in an objective manner. The subject can be thought of as caught in an imaginary field that the viewer controls. The term abject is brought into Foster s study when the reverse occurs, and the gaze is controlled by the subject. An example of this, described by Foster, is seen in photographer Cindy Sherman s work, But the play turns perverse when, in some fashion photographs, the gap between imagined and actual body-images becomes psychotic (one or two sitters seem to have no ego awareness at all) and when, in some art history photographs, deidealization is pushed to the point of desublimation: with scarred sacks for breasts and funky carbuncles for noses, these bodies break down the upright lines of proper representation, indeed of proper subjecthood. 24 In Sherman s work the female body becomes the site of abjection or non being, which rejects the gaze of the viewer by twisting the expectations or desires that the viewer has come to expect while gazing. The structures of subject matter that have been deemed 22 Tate Modern 23 Costas Douzinas, and Lynda Nead, ed. Law and the Image. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) Costas Douzinas, and Lynda Nead, ed. Law and the Image. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)

12 proper in our culture have become common ground for the gaze to rest upon, but the abject subject matter challenges the gaze. Foster discusses abjection in terms of Kristeva s definition of exposing the fragility of our boundaries, and where meaning collapses. Both these ideas are popular in contemporary art because they challenge common definitions of how things are ordered and how boundaries can be broken or refigured in culture. 25 Interestingly, Foster questions the relevance of abject art, asking, Can the abject be represented at all? If it is opposed to culture, can it be exposed in culture? If it is unconscious, can it be made conscious and remain abject? In Other words, can there be a conscientious abjection, (his emphasis) or is this all there can be? Indeed, can abject art ever escape an instrumental, indeed moralistic, use of the abject? 26 These questions all center around the effectiveness of abject art to confront the viewer on the level that Kristeva and Sherman and others intend without being misinterpreted for pornography or some Other conventional association. Along with these questions Foster outlines the directions of contemporary abject art into two categories: the first is to identify with the abject, to approach it somehow to probe the wound of trauma, to touch the obscene object-gaze of the real, and the second is, to represent the condition of the abjection in order to provoke its operation to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, even repellent in its own right. In the first direction Foster is referring to artists who thrive on placing the sexual, and obscene in museums as a form of defiance, while the second refers to artists who seem fixated on the perverse in a childlike fascination Costas Douzinas, and Lynda Nead, ed. Law and the Image. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) Costas Douzinas, and Lynda Nead, ed. Law and the Image. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999) Costas Douzinas, and Lynda Nead, ed. Law and the Image. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)

13 Like Foster s inquiry of Kristeva s work, David Houston Jones scholarship also offers insight. In reading Kristeva s interpretation of abjection Jones poses the question, Does the subject become the author of another self as a result of the original dictation of its identity? This question is posed in terms of Kristeva s original conceiving of abjection in which the child first attempts to break away from the mother and the subsequent failure of this action. In this failure the above question begs an answer; stated in simpler terms, can the subject learn something deeper about the self by initially failing. In this instance of abjection a new self must be found, a new identity must be created, and in these changes it would seem that a new form of power and self-empowerment is had. We must also remember that the abject state is a state of formlessness, of absence of form, and because this state is witnessed, such as in the viewing of one of Sherman s photographs, the viewer must reconceive of what that subject matter should represent and how it compares to subject matter viewed prior to the abjected state. In this situation the viewer would be consciously engaging in an abjective moment. This issue of finding the empowering the self after abjection is reminiscent of Hegel s master-slave scenario where the subject is in a constant struggle to regain himself against the Other, and of course Lacan s mirror stage in which the alienation from the Other occurs. (Oliver, 44) Whenever the Other is established there is a conflict with the self, but in some cases the self chooses to let the Other take over. In one such case David Houston Jones writes of the abject as it applies to the tattooed body of Jean Genet s fictional character Bulkaen in the story Miracle de la Rose: The defiant decoration of the surface of Bulkaen s body is only activated by its organic disablement in death. As in the analogous description of the tattoos of the children of Mettray in Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, one of the chief functions of Bulkaen s bodily inscriptions is to create a covert, forbidden mode of signification 13

14 which evades the dominant signifying practices of the social milieu (here the penal environment) and which cannot be read by them: The body increasingly becomes the material out of which this subversive and unsuspected territory is unfurled, paradoxically losing the distinctness which characterizes it as the body of a human subject. [ ] The tattoos prove to be constituted through the collision of two contradictory impulses: the affirmation of identity through the fostering of a covert language and the reduction of the body to a series of unsignifying marks and undifferentiated, impersonal surfaces 28 Bulkain s body must become abjected for the tattooed inscription to become take the place of the self. Ironically the tattooed body is then abjected from society because of its subversive nature. Jones explains how Kristeva s notion of abjection begins in the body but moves to the psyche and then to a mode of action, along with having ties to Christian celebration: it is specifically caught up in abjection s movement of expulsion, a spasmodic purge rooted in the body but translated to the psyche and ultimately to modes of signification. Imagery of the Christian Mass and Passion persists here, compounding its alignment with abjection s fall and redemption of identity 29 Abjective graphic design? It is precisely this redemption of identity, that Jones mentions, that makes abjection so illusive in the realm of the visual. Traditionally graphic design has been concerned with creating identity for something. If abjection works to disrupt identity, then what could be the value of introducing it into design? It would seem that a disruption of identity would only cause loss of identity. But this is exactly why it needs to be introduced into graphic design: the loss of identity reveals the Other in design, and this is essential for unraveling cultural stigma. 28 David Houston Jones, The Body Abject. (Oxford: Lang, 2000) David Houston Jones, The Body Abject. (Oxford: Lang, 2000) 19 14

15 We cross over through the visual into the Other s space. Through a visual display of the Other s cultural make-up we experience the Other as closer to the self, or we abject our self in order to assimilate new beliefs that reconsider the Other. It is through the power of the visual that we are able to harness abjection as a technique for realization, as either the Other or the self. It is the beauty of abjection that it is able to reveal the Other in all things, whether it be the tenants of Christianity, or the inner body 30 Foster s questions need to be reconsidered. By asking these tentative questions ( Can the abject be represented at all? ) Foster attempts to corner the abject into a fixed place, one that can be easily understood and used. But the abject will never be understood, and especially not understood the same by all. What needs to be addressed is whether culture deserves a renewal, or as Kristeva suggests a rebirth. 31 One last note for the graphic designer concerned with creating an abject moment in his work; Julia Kristeva writes, It (the abject) kills in the name of life a progressive despot; it lives at the behest of death an operator in genetic experimentations; it curbs the Other s suffering for its own profit a cynic (and a psychoanalyst); it establishes narcissistic power while pretending to reveal the abyss an artist who practices his art as a business. 32 (my emphasis) 30 as Kristeva suggests when we confront the fragility of the inner body it reminds us that we are mortal it is the part of us (blood, organs, saliva) that we defy in order to live our lives without the reminder of death. 31 Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) Kelly Oliver, ed. The Portable Kristeva. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)