پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 4 (امرداد و شهریور 1386)

What is criticism and who is a critic? What is art and why so many artists frown upon their works been criticized? Criticism is aimed at distinguishing flaws from merits, values from disvalues, and the right from the wrong, in addition to giving a better understanding of the artists’ work. It, moreover, informs the artiists about their faults and merits. Criticism, in one way or another, is a double-edged blade; it praises and condemns. It aspires in most cases to illuminate the merits and demerits, in order to help us make a better choice. There have been various critical approaches and there have been different reasons for them to come into being. Political, social and religious movements, along with psychological, aesthetic and school-orieented backgrounds have prompted the formation of new critical approaches; social progress and the change in the social and scientific institutions of the new century can be added to the list as well. Some of these critical approaches have been approved of by critics and experts and some are still being experimented. A brief study of these approaches is what this article aspires to provide.

The world of criticism provides an arena for a dialogue; this dialogue in the contemporary world moves from one subject to another and includes cultural areas as well. The word “culture” was originally used to talk about raising animals and crops. It was also associated with worship (the word “cult” meaning worship is one of its derivatives). From sixteenth to seventeenth century, the word culture was numerously used to illuminate the growth of the mind and conduct through instruction and education. But it was gradually used as a value for the civilization. It is hardly possible these days to give a comprehensive and precise definition of culture. But it is feasible to pave the way for a better understanding of the factors involved in culture by reviewing the most important issues in cultural studies. This problem displays itself as cultural criticism and cultural theory, and this is the only way to map the untrodden routes of modernism in Iran in order to build up a contemporary cultural dialogue. This article is not to analyze the whole area of criticism and culture, and it is just a brief review of the conditions involved. The examples taken are mostly from visual arts, but they can be likewise applied to other areas of art.

Among the researches done in the area of cognition and perception of the process of aesthetic experience, Michael Parsons’s field research formed by the effect of Piaget’s school can be regarded as the foundation of scientific research on art objects. Having done a structuralist classification of the elements involved in the understanding of artistic works, Parsons (being influenced by expressive critics) relates the stages of aesthetic experience based on the formation of mind and cognitive development to the age difference.

This article, which begins with a critique of psychoanalytic criticism, attempts to compare the traditional criticism of literature and art, with psychoanalytic criticism. The former one, originated from Plato and Aristotle, was founded base on the master- subject relationship between philosophy and literature and was absolutely dominant until nineteenth century; the latter one, on the other hand, tries to subvert this relationsship. This article is to study this relationship and to study the background and the major developments of psychoanalytic criticism as a pluralistic method of interpretation which mainly aims at analyzing literary and artistic works.

Jacques Lacan is definitely one of the most remarkable figures of post-structuralism. Being influenced by Saussure’s and Claude Levi-Strauss’s views, he fundamentally changed contemporary psychoanalysis. Lacan’s ideas are, in other words, a review of Freud’s thoughts, which are mainly known as a “Return to Freud”. But the fact is that Lacan’s being influenced by structuralist ideas provided him with a new undersstanding of the unconscious. The unconscious, in Lacan’s view, has no autonomous identity but possesses a linguistic structure; in addition to that, he provided us with a new definition for subjectivity which is based on “lack”. Subject, in Lacan’s theory, does not essentially bear a unified, consistent form, but it is the “other” that forms the heart of the identity for the subject. The presence of the “other” helps the subject to find identity and to come to self-knowledge through this “other”. Psychoanalysis takes an important place in post-structuralist criticism. Object-centrality and decentralism, two important features of Lacanian psycchoanalysis, distinguish it from the classical psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s theory, there are three basic orders in the life of human being which are the key terms as well: desire, gender and unconscious language. In this article, I first define theses key terms in brief; then bring Lacan’s own analysis about these terms into discussion and study some of the examples in order to make a better understanding of them. Finally, I will briefly discuss the differences between Lacanian criticism and other post-structuralist readings.

For Lacan, as for Freud, psychoanalysis is a project of interpretation that has nothing to do with empirical research and positivist investigation. Just as clinical psychoanalytic interpretation must concentrate on the psychic text, filmic psychoanalytic interpretation must focus on the filmic text and explore and find the spectator inherent within—rather than external to—this text. Language, psychoanalysis and film constitute an interrelated potpourri whose hermeneutical implications would unfold praxis with profound underlying semiotics and semantics.

To bring psychoanalysis and literature together is to evoke at once certain familiar juxtapositions and unssettled considerations. Such an undertaking brings forward the relation, for example, of language to the human psyche, of mental operation to aesthetic structures, and of the unconscious to literary texts. Among the many questions elicited by these series of terms and what they exemplify, the following are of closer significance to the purpose of this study. Can psychoanalysis claim any legitimacy when imported into the study of literary texts? Can psychoanalytic literary criticism reveal the structure and rhetoric of literary texts? Or, more specific to the purposes of this undertaking, can psychoanalytic theories and concepts be appropriated to treat the structure and time frame of a novel and, is there a place where literary and psychic processes coincide?