Listening for echoes: Afterwardsness as a model for artistic practice

Building on Freud's ideas on Nachträglichkeit (Afterwardsness), I ask how and why a work of art may become a site of emotional/psychological investment. The Freudian concept Nachträglichkeit describes how an experience that is either incomprehensible or traumatic is nonetheless retained unconsciously, then revivified at a later time in a different context. For André Green, this concept is fundamental to psychoanalysis, as it shatters the conventional temporal model while at the same time providing a basis for psychic causality, specific to psychoanalysis. This may be understood more broadly as the French conception, Après-coup, wherein the German term suggests a conception of time that involves a double movement: from the past to the present and from the present to the past, simultaneously. I employ this latter biphasic concept as a way to think about how the spectator engages with a work of art, which is outside conventional ideas of the direction of time in terms of past/present/future. I emphasise the simultaneity of a backward and forward movement through a practice-based response to three artworks, mapping the diachronic and synchronic associations (or echoes) through a framework of transdisciplinary methods, which provide the basis for case studies. These case studies represent a model of practice designed to provide a structure for speculation on meaning and dynamics in relation to psychic causality in artistic practice. The work of art gains its efficacy in/through representing unresolved affect categories, in a Nachträglich action. This finds correspondence with recent debates in psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience. My findings show that the act of identification with a work of art can be read as a formation of the unconscious in relation to biographical material.