Reflective/ Potential Space and the ‘Sign Vehicle’ of the Expendable Surface of inscription
There is an ineluctable link between Benjamin’s notion of ‘Denkraum,’ or reflective space, and Winnicott’s notion of ‘potential space,’ or the space that by means of, transitional object relations enables the child to separate from what Winnicott termed ‘the good enough mother.’ This separation constitutes the distance necessary for the process of individuation to take place. Initially, the role of the good ‘enough mother’ is to protect the infant from a premature awareness of separateness. This begins to change when the ‘good enough mother’ creates a space for the child to use a ‘transitional object’ as a substitute for the mother in the process of separation. Once this distance has been achieved, the transitional object loses all importance and is discarded. The necessary distance to the mother generates individuation and what Winnicott termed ‘potential space’ that, according to Winnicott, is the source of all subsequent creativity and cultural experience (Winnicott, 1971). Potential space is then an “oscillating space” that allows for an “unhampered mobility” between inner and outer, between absence and presence, over which the child has a sense of control (Pigrum, 2021).
Of importance in the present context is what Winnicott writes concerning ‘cultural experience’, as ‘something ... into which individuals and groups of people may contribute, and from which we all may draw if we have somewhere to put what we find’ (italics are Winnicott’s)’ (Pigrum, 2021; Winnicott, 1971, p. 99). We identify the printed matter upon which Kentridge draws, the panels used by Warburg to mount, arrange and rearrange the images of the Atlas Mnemosyne, and Benjamin’s notebooks, as such ‘places’ that in their turn are integrated most often into physical places. In the case of Benjamin, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was the ‘place’ where, in order to ‘envision the multiplicity of cultural manifestations’, he collected and collated an ‘irregular rhythm of textual fragments, subjected to multiple digressions and examinations, beyond the completeness and coherence of the book form.’ (Ibid.) For Warburg, at the prompting of one of his assistants, he began to collate images on hessian stretchers covered in black cloth in his library and the hotel room in Rome where he worked on the panels of the Atlas in the last years of his life; Following Duarte ‘...both Warburg and Benjamin already incorporated this idea of an ‘outside of thought and image, materialized in an externalized medium (italics are mine).’ (Duarte, 2021) In the late 1990s, Kentridge began to draw on the pages of books, atlases, illustrated encyclopedias, dictionaries and ledgers, and filmed the process in his studio.
Following Skagestad on Peirce’s Semeiotic model of mind, all thinking is conducted in signs and is in part an exosomatic process that is ‘facilitated or impeded by the specific physical features of notation…(and) the potentiality of external objects to induce certain states of mind…(where) this potentiality depends on the specific physical characteristics of said external objects’ (Skagestad, 2004, pp. 241-256, 246-247).
Jelmstedt writes, 'The transitional object is gradually cathected and abandoned, but the mode of experiencing that belongs to the intermediate area is preserved and widens…into the intense experiencing that pertains to culture, art …and creative activity.’ (Jelmstedt, 2000, p. 124-131) He then goes on to describe the way this activity involves ‘the encounter between the artist and his medium…’ (Ibid.) We should recall here that the transitional object, instrumental in affecting a distance to the ‘good enough mother,’ is conceived by the child as, ‘coming from without,’ that is to say found like that of the expendable surface of inscription. We suggest that the efficacy of such a surface lies in its coming from the world of things or 'Dingwelt' or thing world placing it outside the self where its cultural value is marginalized allowing for a postponement of premature closure and not subject to the pressure of preservation.
I have placed an emphasis on the found nature of the expendable surface of inscription. It would seem that the surfaces of inscription that Kentridge chose to draw on from the late 90s onwards have the quality of what both Nussbaum (1986) and Lacan (1977), in different contexts, term tuché, or the ancient Greek for fortuitously found, and because of certain physical characteristics, or a particular arrangement of signifiers, serve as an expendable ‘sign-vehicle’ that promotes a non-finto probative approach, or what the writer Peter Handke calls, a ‘way out’ of determinacy. I suggest that the quality of expendability is, for Handke, Kentridge, and other artists and writers, a Zwischenraum, or an in-between, probative potential space (Handke, 2019), free from the oblivion of ‘litter’ but, at the same time, unlike the white sheet of paper, expendable, and therefore free from the pressure of preservation. In this sense, the expendable surface of inscription, like the pages Kentridge draws upon might be conceived of as what Duarte calls, ‘ruins, historical objects and cultural fragments…liberated from hierarchies and homogenizing principles of instrumental reason and temporal continuity, making for the appearance of new texts …’ (Duarte, 2022) Something that would apply to the black and white photographs and newspaper cuttings Warburg attached to the panels of the Atlas and the myriad citations and visual material that Benjamin collected for the Arcades project.