CCIG/OpenSpace: Topologies of the Psychosocial

On the 22 November 2012, CCIG and Open Space co-organised a seminar on “Topologies of the Psychosocial”.

Speakers with expertise in psychoanalysis, architectural theory and English literature will open up a discussion around spatial forms, the production of space and the social expression of human passions. The event was convened to explore the spatial imaginaries through which we understand, and can reconceptualise, the relationship between the psyche and the social world.

The two speakers were Professor Jane Rendall (University College London, University of London) and Jan Campbell (University of Birmingham), and they opened up a discussion around spatial forms, the production of space and the social expression of human passions.

Jane Rendell is a writer, and architectural historian/theorist/designer, whose work explores interdisciplinary intersections between architecture, art, and psychoanalysis. Her authored books include Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). She is Professor of Architecture and Art, and Vice Dean of Research at the Bartlett, UCL.

Jan Campbell is a Reader in English Literature and Psychoanalysis. She works in psychoanalytic literary and cultural studies and is interested in how the unconscious structures our relationship with our personal and non-personal selves, with our gender, sexuality and culture.

The event enabled vivid discussions on topological understandings of space through psychoanalytic understandings of the psyche, alongside examples drawn from art, architecture and literature. The participants explored both topological and topographical understandings of space and applied these examples drawn from various social worlds and clinical settings. In addition, emphasis was placed on the need to think about the form in which psychosocial research and theory is presented – i.e in ways that maintain the refusal to make clear distinctions between conscious and unconscious thought/communication.

Programme

13:00: Lunch

14:00-16:00: Seminar with Prof Jane Rendall (University College London, University of London) and Dr Jan Campbell (University of Birmingham)

Prof Jane Rendall

To and Fro: A Site-Writing         

Starting out with Freud’s two topographic models, which describe developments in his understanding of the psychical apparatus, in terms of the agencies of the conscious (Cs), preconscious (Pcs) and unconscious (Ucs) in the first, the ego, id, and superego in the second, my talk traces the journey of a writing, which moves back and forth between inner and outer worlds. At first a text where I wove reflections on my childhood homes with a more theoretical commentary on spaces of encounter in academic life, I returned to these memories and extended them in connection to themes of threshold and sanctuary for ‘To Miss the Desert’, a response to Nathan Coley’s Black Tent (2003). For the exhibition (Hi)story (2005) including works by four artists – Jananne Al-Ani, Tracey Moffatt, Adriana Varejão and Richard Wentworth – I selected phrases from ‘To Miss the Desert’ and re-made them as refrains, as part of a longer essay entitled ‘You Tell Me’, which explores the theme of topological fiction. In what is perhaps a final transformation, for An Embellishment: Purdah, a two-part text installation for an exhibition, Spatial Imagination, I created twelve ‘scenes’ of equal length from ‘To Miss the Desert’ and laid them out in the catalogue as a grid, to match the twelve panes of glass in the gallery window where I wrote the word purdah repeatedly. This process of transformation could be described as a ‘site-writing’, where the acts of writing and re-writing are re-worked in relation to changing sites, making patterns to and fro between inside and outside.

Dr Jan Campbell

Freud’s Dandelions: Psychoanalysis and the Topologies of Space-Time Travel

Lacan’s topologies of the psyche have been used by psycho-geographers to think about movement through space and place. In my discussion I want to describe a psychoanalytical topology which is not Lacanian but Freudian and provides us with account of the movement of the unconscious in space and time: something which moves between inside and outside, and between past, present and future. Topologies in my account are both fantasies and our unconscious perceptions of reality. They are the telepathic movers, shakers and translators of the repressed unconscious. As such they both provide new shapes for our ego and new topographies and perspectives beyond the ego, in and through which we travel.

My discussion will centre on Freud’s early paper ‘Screen Memories’ (1899) and I will be using some of the work from my forthcoming book Freudian Passions, to show how Freudian typologies are unconsciously engaged in moving, communicating and sublimating our passions; and how they are also at work in navigating emotions and social space. I will draw on material from clinical, literary and theoretical sources.